I’m not sure why you’re surprised. The Explorer’s League and the Reliquary used to murder each other for shiny things and now they’re birdwatching together. As far as DF is concerned, the factions and their subsidiaries might as well not exist.
Factions have been in a state of cold (sometimes hot) war since vanilla and no one seemed to be upset.
UNTIL Blizzard put in the Hall of Fame and a bunch of Alliance players felt bad about their faction choice, even though they didn’t raid in the first place. So they started screaming that the factions needed to be removed, and here we are.
It would be nice, but Forsaken leaders aren’t allowed to be evil anymore apparently. Not even like, borderline evil. They have to be near Anduin levels of nice now, as if players couldn’t just…play humans if that’s what they want.
They haven’t even used most of the Forsaken leaders in years. They wrote them all out when Cata came out and put in Lillian Voss instead, for reasons I’ve never understood.
(Except, of course, that Cataclysm’s main purpose was to destroy everything that made WoW popular.)