Its pretty obvious classics success greatly influenced blizzards perception of what they thought the player base wanted. They wanted to create a dangerous open world feel that people praises classic for. The problem was they forgot the part where classics open world difficulty wasn’t that it was hard, is it was that players were genuinely stupid and the learning curve was relatively simple. Fight more than one mob? Run away. Problem solved.
Nobody asked for anything like the maw in retail. Not anyone with a brain anyways.