You’re wrong. OP has the correct expectations based on what Blizzard said:
Currently, many realms do not have healthy populations (no idea why they wouldn’t connect DD or Grob to any other server). Hopefully, they are actually monitoring and will rectify this in the near future.
I left a couple of characters behind and my realms are dead. Fortunately, I didn’t waste money cloning given that Blizzard has not delivered on the expectations as they explicitly stated.
I will consider cloning/playing Classic Era if they actually fix this by making more connections.