Again, the ones that make the call are Blizzard, who is at fault on two ends. On the one end for watering down void elves, and on the other for not introducing high elves as the allied race at the end of Legion. The entire mess was avoidable, but it required action from Blizzard. Put simply, Blizzard created the problem and the players are simply reacting.
So I’ll ask again, what were you expecting? The high elf crowd to say “okay, we give up”?
If you mean direct story relevance, then yes. That said, high elves have been around for more expansions than either. High elves ran the Alliance-side of Dalaran and argent tournament in Wrath. High elves were also siding with Jaina during the time she went crazy in MoP. And they made an appearance during Legion.
The Jinyu weren’t even relevant for the entirety of Mists, because they only mattered in the crap that led to the cinematic with jade dragon statue. The ankoa existed as accessories and vanished after Nazjatar become irrelevant.
You keep saying this while ignoring the underlying problem: nothing has been written for them.
This isn’t like the night elves that remained static despite having things happen to them (another sign of bad writing); high elves suffer from true story neglect because they haven’t shown any signs of growth since the destruction of the original Sunwell. They’ve at most made appearances to remind Alliance players that they still exist, but that’s the extent to which they have been used.
The problem is that lowering the barrier between factions will not happen for another one or two expansions by my estimations. On top of that, I expect there will be resistance to it from the “but i want war in warcraft” crowd.
This is assuming Blizzard doesn’t do something stupid like create another war out of nowhere.