Without raids what they would accomplish is to kill any advantages this game has over other games and you can make your own conclusion if that happened. It could pretty much kill the game.
Thinking we would get good story telling because there’s no raid is laughable at best.
And the terrible pvp trend is not because of raids, but because Ion think it’s fair to ask someone that only wants to pvp to farm wqs everyday to be competitive and do raids to get their bis gear with no pvp vendor.
Now that Mythic+ Dungeons exist, I’d say that’s still an advantage over other popular PvE MMORPGs. WoW dungeons are usually pretty decent, but keeping them relevant in this way puts them up a notch.
That said, yeah, a quality raiding experience is pretty much what WoW is known for being good at, and while I’d be curious to see how they’d use those resources elsewhere, it is NOT a negligible amount of people who participate in raiding, even if you ignore LFR.
Firing more of the rank and file because hey, there’s less work to be done now, don’t need the dead weight anymore.
The idea that this dev team would put more focus into other areas of the game if they removed something is laughable. It’s all about maximum retention for minimum work, now.