They literally are not fine.
How would connecting realms be functionally different than merging them? I don’t think the person you are replying to was in any way attempting to imply what we have now is fine, but rather the idea of connecting realms rather than merging is fine.
Connecting has all of the upsides (shared AH, shared guilds, trading, etc) and none of the downsides (name loss).
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From my perspective they are indeed fine. I enjoy my connected realms when I’m playing Retail. Mega/Super realms won’t solve any issues. Instead we’ll end up with massive lag and Blizzard will be forced to shard them even further into the ground.
Remove sharding, Remove CRZ should allow realms to feel populated again.
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To put it succinctly as possible…
NO.
Would you be interested in more connectivity between realms while preserving the fidelity of your character’s name?
We’ll all get last names! …only the last name is your original server.
No and I wouldn’t want server consolidation anyway. Just about the only people who are advantaged by this are raiders.
Make it so that there’s an invisible addendum to the end of a player’s name before the change and then create it as a fusion of the new servers.
Moon Guard + Wyrmest Accord = Wyrmrest Guard, etc. Two people are named, I dunno, “Ezze”
Both look at “Ezze” and come up as “Ezze”, but in code their names are stored as “Ezze-MoonGuard” “Ezze-WyrmrestAccord” people are happy.
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oh yes those two servers would love to be merged together - your server couldn’t stand even being CRZ in goldshire with moonguard.
It was an example. No need to be inflammatory. 
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Yes well most servers are negatively affected by those types of mergers. Being connected is bad enough that the community that existed before dies.
There’s a timing issue with server consolidation.
Right now players are way down because BFA sucks. If 9.0 is good and brings a lot of people back, you’re going to have population issues.
More connected realms is a better approach.
They would be if that was the pinnacle of player organization, but we now actually have actual Communities that span servers if you want a grouping of players that does that. And you can do this while being part of a guild to boot. Hell, I have multiple people that I raid with regularly that aren’t part of my guild because they’re not on a connected realm and they’ve been with us for years (since before I joined the guild in Legion), before Communities were actually a thing. And we can do that because the only content that’s restricted in cross realm participation is Mythic raiding, which is extremely niche.
None of that is news to me nor does it respond to anything I’ve said, at least nothing I can pick out that’s seemingly a response to any particular point I made. My position is still if the goal is to make one megaserver for RP and one normal server, cool. If the goal is to shore up specific populations then no. It’s not necessary. Everything (aside from Mythic raiding) can be done cross realm anyways.
Yes, i have a very deep attachment to some.
Definitely.
Aman’Thul got passed over first time. We have no connection. Server is dead.
That’s not a failure of the system. It’s a failure of Blizz to connect more.
They literally are fine if they’d just do a whole lot more.
Exactly.
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Is it impossible to keep the naming convention of the servers they were on even if the servers were shutdown? So that people could have the same name on the server and just be different realm in tootip?
No one needs to lose their names when realms become connected. Just do it the way they did with connected realms, toons with the same name are differentiated by their realm of origin.
Presto!
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I don’t want to lose my name. Just like many others.
However, I think many of the individual realms/connected realms (With very few exceptions) simply aren’t populated enough to be considered healthy anymore.
I’m more in favor of connecting additional realms, but merging could work as well – the name problem can be sidestepped with the addition of surnames.