Ironically, today’s Classic player base looks a lot like Retail player base with it’s love of immediate self-satisfaction. They are willing to have their identity as a WoW player utterly reduced to a number on a spreadsheet - and they’re willing to pay for it to get it quickly. To each their own.
However, Blizzard is ultimately to blame for not policing bots and the subsequent gold-buying and feeding the bot-farm/gold-buying cancer on Classic WoW. This affects the rest of the player base who doesn’t buy gold in a caustic way.
Blizzard and a significant pay-to-win portion of the player base don’t care if the patient dies because the corpse will be tossed in the graveyard and replaced with Cata Classic. They know bots kill the game. They know current Classic WoW is terminal.
This is explains why Hardcore is more popular than ever. Many players realize the current pay-to-win, bot-infested game to end up with a 99 parse is empty and ultimately unfulfilling. Classic Wrath is cheapened by pay to win - like cheap fast food.
As long as the Blizzard and the pay-to-win players can together harvest as much as profit and parses they can from the host, they will continue to buy from the bots and pay to win in GDKPs.