Warcraft 3 was made concurrently with wow to not only fund development of wow but publicly test the shared engine and netcode.

blizzard hired major raid critics on the everquest forums as devs (kaplan being the most famous) and even hired most of everquest's original staff when an unpopular expansion lead to an employee exodus at sony online.

wow was created as a way to:
1) excuse raiding on the job.
2) provide a sandbox where raiders were kings and all else existed to make raiders feel special (in everquest, raiding was as much of a meme as pvp is here).

there was a problem however: blizzard had no idea what they were doing and had no idea how much work an mmo took.

While blizzard vets were off having nervous breakdowns and smoking weed in their offices, unsupervised workers crafted the wow world and systems out of passion (not unlike how games like earthbound, pokemon, silent hill, majora's mask, etc were made).

Once the game started to get traction, the blizzard vets came out of their hibernation and took all the credit while firing off all the actual nameless devs who made the "world" part of wow.

this is why wow is artificially "raid or die" and why vanilla has this unexplainable quality that has only ever been ruined by blizzard and did not come back with "classic." you really did have to be there, because the people who made "wow" a thing are long gone on purpose.

Of course, the newest round of wow devs are not the blizzard vets, and in copying other mmos they are accidentally allowing in some "rp" and "game" elements into their supposed "mmorpg" that really only was a poorly disguised "yasslighting" simulator for raiders for over two decades.

Now, you - the raider - are going to be angry about that change, but it's about time wow decided to pretend to be a game instead of just being a hamster wheel you pay to ride around on.