The smartest way to play the game, for years, has been to sub for a month at launch, sub for a month at the tail end of Expansion.1 / beginning of Expansion.2, another month at tail end of Expansion.3/Expansion.4, repeat. Unless you are really in love with raiding or haven't broken your "Collect-em-all" tendencies for mounts/toys/pets/whatever, Wow hasn't been worth playing everyday for years.
But no, there isn't an MMO opening. People fail to realize that, much like RPGs, MMOs have gone from a genre to a flavor. There are no RPGs because levelling systems have been built into everything, from Call of Duty to sports games. Similarly, there are no new MMOs, because nearly everything has online hooks to other players, whether strictly single player games having leaderboard tracking and ghost runs, to most games having multiplayer links (even Zelda types, in Genshin Impact) to shared hub worlds/overworlds (Destiny, Anthem, etc.), even if most of the game is running on your computer.