The thread has been like that for a few years now. WoW didnt touch me in my no-no spot, but nothing so far has peaked my interest in the new expansion. The things that would make others and myself excited isnt even on the radar. The gathering and trades stuff looks interesting? The dungeons look "samey" and we know shit all about the raids. You know, the big three that they are touting for this expansion. Just everything Ive seen so far is low excitement.
WoW has been all about 'nothing new' since Cataclysm.
The only industry innovation that WoW has had since 'flying mounts' in Cata was Mythic+, which is arguably just another way to recycle existing content.
They did set the standard for 'better EQ' in 2004, the standard for 'instanced structured / ranked PvP' in TBC/Wrath, and modern raid design owes itself to WOTLK as well.
WoW has stagnated instead of innovating, opting to take features from other games that have innovated in their stead that worked for those games but made them into bullet points that they can put on an expansion to sell a product instead of making a fun game.
Dragon Riding was taken from GW2, for instance. That is now something they can put out on a marketing / press sheet for bean counters to enjoy at their marketing department like EQ1 does every time they make a new expansion. They make some sort of system (Dragon's Hoard, Mercenaries, Familiar/Illusion/Mount Keyring, etc) that they can tie to the purchase value and require to buy each year for the bean counters.
That exact strategy is what lead to EQ1's decline and WoW's rise in popularity in 2004.
WoW had its 'EQ Gates of Discord mass quit' moment with Shadowlands recently. They opted to grow the ire of their playerbase with terribly designed content and artificial timeblocks, and a new innovative idea that was more casual friendly that respected its players time took over in popularity - FF14.
Just like EQ1 did with the Combine server, they opted to lean into the years of growing nostalgia yearning for the glory days. Wrath Classic is coming out soon. It'll probably be moderately successful like the EQ TLPs are every few years. The retail version of WoW will always be the red-headed bastard child of the game going forward as it is with EQ1, where it only exists to sell expansions to a dwindling playerbase to keep the IP alive for classic milking.