I don’t know how you arrived at that number just going off of the graphs shown.
… What?
What about it was spin doctoring? The whole point of their thing at GDC was “Shadowlands brought us to a low we did not expect due to our failure to deliver an appealing product, but we’re seeing a generally solid upwards shift overall in subscriber count from taking WoW in a different direction overall”.
If that statement is “trying to justify jobs” to you, then what do you want Blizzard to say?