(This was posted on the “abuse survivor” thread and deleted for a naughty word that I thought I’d censored properly, but apparently not, and then the thread was locked. Reposting here with cleaned up language just to get the points out.)
The interpretation of Sylvanas as a survivor of abuse was most firmly held in the WC3-Wrath period. Her character took on a new direction around the time of Cata, probably due to behind-the-scenes changes in those in charge of the story. But her Cata version doesn’t contradict the interpretation as much as her BfA version does.
Just being raised as undead wasn’t the abuse metaphor. If she’d been raised as a free-willed undead and run off to do her own thing, I don’t think we’d see the abuse connection being made as much. It’s a combination of the fact that she was raised by the same guy who killed her, explicitly as punishment for causing him problems, and the fact that he then went on to mind-control her and force her to serve him against her will that really did it.
In Cata, per the undead starting experience, they were all explicitly given the choice to either serve her, do their own thing, or go back to being dead. In that sense, she was making sure that no one ever had to go through what she had.
I’ve always chalked those and the Dalaran mage thing up to “Stonetalon Garrosh syndrome,” where lack of communication caused a hole in the lore. I suspect someone wrote a quest using established tropes—“Your friend has become a zombie and now wants to eat your brains! How spooooooky!”—without realizing it didn’t actually fit WoW’s previous lore, and due to the general mess and overworkedness of the team during Cata, the quests made it to live. Then the devs had to try to explain it after the fact, so they came up with the “temporary frenzied state” thing, which I don’t believe has ever been seen in-game since then.