Let’s take real life money transactions out of the argument…because honestly - they’re not standard in any way.
If you are playing the game standard, without buying boosts/tokens/shop mounts for cash/etc. your faction is the first permanent choice you get in the game.
just because you or whoever else is willing to hit the wow Shop for all these QOL services, and you decided to have your MMORPG experience utilizing it in that way doesn’t make it a non-permanent choice.
For me - who has not paid for a WoW service like name change/faction change/server change/etc. My faction absolutely was the first permanent choice for me, and i know for thousands of others…my server is just one example of great evidence to support this.
Just another straw man argument imo by what i perceive to be players that want WoW to be a completely different game, while ignoring the fact that there has been 0 polls out to reflect that the “majority” of players want to remove factions in the first place.
Factions are one of the core elements of this specific game - folks that care the most are min/maxers imo. Horde vs alliance is a much bigger picture than if you’re a vulperra or gnome lol
I kind of like the option that Alliance are the faction with better RP/exploration if you want that flavor, and many of these horde servers have the tryhard-game mode culture.
Faction divide is the least of dev concerns - and the game has proven it works with them in place. Playerbase can evolve without the devs having to be hands on at all - so community issue 
almost forgot my 
hehe