I played WoW a ton back between Burning Crusade and Warlords of Draenor. I loved the leveling experience, it was my favorite part of the game. Recently I was talking to a buddy about it and he agreed to try out the game. We picked up a month to try it out, and I learn quickly that so much has changed.
I have no idea what is going on with levels. It looks like original, BC, WotLK zones are all 10-30 now. Cata and Pandaria seem to be 10-35, Draenor is 10-40, and whatever the Broken Isles are is 10-45. We made it to level 10 from just the tutorial. I loved Burning Crusade, but my buddy wants to explore Kalimdor first. I feel like with this progression, we will outlevel outland before we get there. Are we seriously able to skip everything?
Also, my friend cannot use group finder for anything other than one Battle for Azeroth dungeon. I can by using some timewalking thing, but he can’t access it. We walked into Ragefire Chasm and completed it with only us two, so we clearly can do it.
What is the intended progression here?
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There is something called chromie timewalking campaign, where in the Orgrimmar/Stormwind embassies you talk to Chromie to pick a place you want to level in. You can go there pick Burning Crusade and between 10-50 you’ll be leveling in Outlands. You can pick Catacalysm for classic continents.
Chromie timewalking should be available for players once they hit lvl 50 for the first time, but since you’re legacy player you were grandfathered into it. Your friend is completely new? Unfortunately he’s intentionally funneled into either BfA campaign or doing the regular leveling with the levels you mentioned. The intent there was to spread out where people could level, but now they made leveling easier and that’s the result you see 
On the bright side, this lets you try out more classes. Get him to 50 through BfA, have him pick a new class and he can go exploring whereever using timewalking campaign.
I’m… actually pretty sad about this.
So there’s no way to play through in the old progression style at all? If so, I might as well just wait until Classic gets to Panderia again. I frankly don’t care about Battle for Azeroth or Shadowlands, and it’s not what I wanted to show my friend.
This feels like wanting to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but someone is forcing me to watch the second Hobbit movie first.
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I understand and sympathize with your frustration. This was my exact fear when they announced the changes and it turned out to be true. I’m the same as you
Blizzards view (I think) is that the game is too large for its own good. They want players to see the latest wow chapter (bfa) and get ready for shadowlands. And if they want to see the prequel, they level on each expac. Part of the blame is on players. They got sick of leveling so much so now it’s really simple to do.
There is another option though. You can pause your XP and experience story in your intended level. I know it’s not ideal but it’ll let you explore at your own place and do whatever
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Thank you for explaining it for me.
I feel like maybe we should just play classic, but honestly I’m just depressed and apathetic to playing at all now.
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Sorry to discourage you. Classic and BC classic are still really fun and have a very healthy community. Or you can try the xp level lock. Hope it works out.
If you want to play through the content at a challenging level, but get through more than one expansion you can turn off your XP gains. So, your first stop would be to turn them off at 30 which will cover the old world, BC, and Wrath. Then turn it back on when you get to Cata and so on. (Also, keep in mind that you won’t really start overpowering content right away. You generally have to be at least 5 levels over the cap before you’ll start seeing an overlevel bonus, so you don’t have to be precise for the XP stop level.)
The NPCs to talk to to turn off XP:
From a story perspective, if you want to do stuff more in order, then Classic TBC is probably the best place to start as modern WoW’s EK and Kalemdor is in the Cata timeline. I’d reccomend TBC Classic over Classic Era as the Classic content is in both, but TBC has some quality of life improvements. Once you’ve done the EK/Kalemdor content you can decide if you want to do BC in Classic (where you can enjoy the end game content with groups) or if you want to head over to the modern game. (The TBC leveling content is still pretty much in place in modern WoW.)