It’s less Blizzard wanted us to play Night Fae, and more “A lot of people will want to play Night Fae Druid, and will be royally pissed if the most appropriate option to play is not something you can pick and feel comfortable raiding, PvP’ing, or M+'ing with”. Ion literally joked about “Fairy Death Knights” in an interview for instance in a case of why they’ve gone in and tweaked some of them. They didn’t want to encourage people to play obvious flavor mismatches by allowing them to be BIS.
Not all classes have as obvious of a match as Night Fae Druid, Necrolord DK, and Kyrian Paladin. Like, who should Shaman pair with? There’s no one fit, so it doesn’t make sense to encourage one over others. Just let things happen naturally and see what happens.
People stopped playing it when it wasn’t OP anymore, when it was nerfed after Highmaul, so the idea that people played it because they liked it doesn’t add up. They played it because it was OP, regardless of tastes.
It’s easy to say something was a blunder when enough time has passed and it earns you good will at no cost. But you look at something like Pathfinder, that people claim was a blunder, that people claim that Blizzard has said was a blunder… and yet they keep doing Pathfinder. They change the way they do it slightly, but they’re more than happy with the end result. It’s very easy for Blizzard to say something was a blunder and for you to misunderstand what their intent in saying that is.
They received more data… and then they changed their mind before the thing went live.
And as you said, it happened within a 24 hour window. If they can pivot that fast based on new data, and you look at the current situation and their refuse to pivotal, one can imply that the data suggests that Blizzard is on the right course. Because if they received actual mass outcry, and not 6000 posts from Timbaeslice, then they’d likely be able to quickly change direction. The fact that they had a ripcord in case of emergency, and more recently cut the ripcord so that it couldn’t be pulled… that indicates that they know they’re on the right path.