Duh? I don’t recall anyone ever saying online gaming was dead, given most of us recognize that MMOs haven’t been the only or even the primary form of online gaming in roughly a decade.
You know what the most highly played online games have been in 2020? PUBG, Fortnite, league of legends, counterstrike, and hearthstone. Games with low time commitment, low investment, pick-up-and-go gameplay. And that entire market is utterly dwarfed by mobile games.
You will never make WoW as successful as it used to be by rebuilding it to be the way it used to be. Know how we know that? Classic. Perfectly popular with its target audience, but nowhere near the raging success it enjoyed in its own time. It’s been 15 years. The climate has changed.