That is the problem with shadowlands. They do have proper after lives but we only saw 4 of them
Lore wise, there are infinite versions of afterlives out there but we only saw the 4 that kept the shadowlands going.
Like…the warrior order hall is another form of an afterlife.
Shadowlands just felt streamlined because we only interacted with the first ones and their zones. We never seen the after lives for majority of souls.
When you die you go to Shadowlands and you have to start questing
having read the sylvanas book i think the shadowlands is stupidly designed. your wife loves you so much that she doesnt want you to suffer in pain with a terminal diease and ritually kills you, out of love but then she spends her afterlife alone as a reward for loving you. you dont hate that she did it you love her for not having you suffer for years.
no families are reunited in death.
someone who killed you can get a better afterlife than you got.
and the story before everything got changed totally pointed at the fact we shouldn’t trust the afterlifes we did go to.
a robot just sends every soul where it thinks is best.
theres 1000000000000000s of places you can get sent to and just seeing the 5 im glad most of my characters are undead and basicly immortal because the curse of living forever is better than going to any of those stupid places.
and to answer the other part of your question some closer version to heaven hell would have been okay, but would also take the entire afterlife is eldritch horrors if you didn’t have the protection of a cosmic force such as light, void, fel, Elune, and even undeath when you die
After SL, I submitted that the writers are uncreative and boring. This wasn’t even the after life as far as I’m concerned. It felt more like a purgatory…for the players. Having to suffer bland zones and mechanics. And then the torture of the Maw along with Torghast.
On second thought, they did a good job making it seem like all of the afterlife was hell. But no heaven in sight.
Shadowlands was beyond ridiculous. I don’t like any of it as an idea of afterlife. I would have preferred it remain a mystery.
There’s also something extremly crucial and yet completely pushed away by the writers: The impact on the religions.
Come on, the Shadowlands are opened to everyone (or at least for two years) and of course, you will have scholars to study how the Shadowlands work, to check if the afterlife from one religion or another exist.
The Light has no afterlife it seems, so what is the impact on the Light religion in Azeroth?
Only Bwonsamdi and his Da Other Side is in line with a racial religion.
Such knowledge has a devastating impact on any religion because it’s now possible to check and see if it exists.
Only an extrem atheist or a careless (if not stupid) writer wouldn’t care about it.
It changed at the very end of Shadowland, a soul can change of afterlife if it want to be with its loved one.
But even if you have the choice, it’s like opening a phone book with an infinite number of addresses.
Good luck to find the one you want.
On a side note, the first concept was to have only two zones in Shadowland: Order / Disorder.
Somewhere, i think that the result would have been less convulated than this mess.
Its a bit fubar.
The Warrior hall is another example of the problem with SL. In fact, they should have been an important part of SL and the war against the Jailer. Everytime you look back, you see how much of a swing and a miss the writing is.
Shadowlands was developed purely for shareholders, it was a game of numbers.
Ion’s experiment into how much player time can be farmed, almost killed the game.
If you had played Beta SL in the month leading up to release, you’d have seen them systematically dismantle the game to farm more time.
Torghast initially had gear rewards, but it was so popular Blizz couldn’t turn down the opportunity to farm player time again. So it got turned into an endless grind for nothing important, so you couldn’t cap out and you’d keep playing.
They did make it mandatory to get gear upgrade mats, at least until the following patches brought out new gear levels. It was that insidious. Now we have delves with gear rewards, but without the fun of torghast.
So, Eldritch Tentacled horror beyond mortal comprehension who would be responsible for all the conflict and strife throughout the world all to season the souls he would consume and crap out only to repeat the process would probably be better then Shadowlands.
https://legacyofkain.fandom.com/wiki/Elder_God
To anyone that’s curious.
EDIT: … Did I just describe Battle for Azeroth’s ending?
considering my favorite race was told they were wrong about their culture entirely by shadowlands, i think you can figure out how i feel about wow afterlife…
We know that there are Tauren ancestors who have been turned into blue humans with an angel/Greek/Roman aesthetic.
The fact that any race like Tauren or Goblin, turns into giant blue humans when they die (Kyrians) or vampires (Venthyr), ruined WoW’s afterlife to me.
It’s just… it’s all so stupid lol.
I’d rather things stay perma-dead, straight to black, no afterlife, than what I saw in Shadowlands, hated it that much.
Basically every afterlife seems like some sort of hell in one way or another.
They all have drawbacks. How are they paradise/heaven, again?
Never mind the fact there’s more ‘life’ after death- it undermines the whole point.
I think that the entire universe is cheapened by having such an overly-explained and easily-accessible afterlife. The fact you can just go meet dead people, and many of them are unchanged enough that they can just talk to you like nothing happened with all their memories intact, destroys most of the drama and stakes around death to begin with.
I viewed Revendreth as being purgatory and the Maw as hell.
As I recall, Revendreth seemed like the place where the souls went that needed to atone/suffer for their sins(s) and misdeeds and/or be cleansed of some sort of character flaw/imperfection before they could either be deemed worthy of being sent to the other 3 realms, or deemed too be too far gone/not worth saving and thus end up in the Maw to suffer forever
For a Blood Death Knight:
Revendreth: Home away from home! 
Maldraxxus: A summer holiday 
I think the concept was amazing and fully believe we got robbed of the expansion thanks to COVID, the massive corporate scandals, and the initial crying and whining by the mythic raiding tryhard and their wannabe ilk crowd because decisions had performance consequences and they temporarily lost the ability to be able to min max which ultimately did not impact their ability to actually do content so Blizzard cut their losses and just shifted focus to DF to “save” WoW.
I believe Korthia was really meant to be Argus 2.0 where the Jailer was meant to “hook” afterlife worlds to the Maw/Korthia and we spend that time undoing it (similar to how Argus had portals to “other worlds” where we stopped a Legion threat)…but again the world had a IRL pandemic causing businesses worldwide to panic and shift how operations happened AND Blizzard specifically was dealing with perhaps the biggest corporate scandal they’ve ever faced to boot.
Anyway, like I said, the concept of the “infinite afterlives” is a grand idea but I don’t think it’s practical in reality. If a resource like Anima is needed for the infinite realms to function, then it has to stand to reason that all of the denizens have to be funneled into afterlives where that anima could be extracted. There are only finite bodies in the universe and each soul only had a finite amount of anima it could even give meaning, by simple mathematics, it would be impossible to support an “infinite” amount of worlds altogether. Not to mention there wouldn’t even BE a need for infinite afterlives since, at absolute most, each person could have their own perfectly tailored to them which still is a finite number.
But I like to think my ideal afterlife is just basic oblivion. I don’t want to exist or be part of some kind of eternal grand design. I want my consciousness to be erased and for there to be nothing left. No reincarnation or afterlife of any sort. Everything that I am just ceases to be entirely.
I think if anything deserves a retcon in WoW, it is their entire concept of their afterlife. SL more or less ruined it. Removed all the wonder and mystery and made it ordinary. Regular people started showing up like it was a tourist destination and it was just kind of a mess.
I didn’t hate SL from a gameplay standpoint, but I was never on board with their decision to have us romp around the afterlife like national lampoons European vacation or something.