I was in a raiding guild back in 06, one of many in my PvP server, and there were players decked out in PvE gear.
However what we have now is a inflated server, roughly the equivalent of:
So using this scale, imagine the population on a high and full server in Classic. The core gameplay has remained the same, but the servers population inflated.
The game is simply unplayable for a lot of people my man. It shouldn’t take 45 minutes to run into a dungeon, whilst in the process losing party members due to being corpse camped.
It never happened in Vanilla as there simply wasn’t enough players to cause such havoc.