In the case of people who play other WOW TBC Gold games today, it's like experiencing revelations about why TBC and onward is so different or that it's a distinct flavour, which is which is more or less the same than retail or otherwise: it's all the same things however, with different grouping tools and transportationtools, and also different XP bars.
Being a player in Classic WoW and then seeing the way Blizzard did to create honey-to-do chores to keep people engaged in Burning Crusade with cheap WOW Classic TBC Gold rep farming and heroic dungeon grinding - to me it was validation that this game has been a hamster wheel for more than two decades. It wasn't an issue with Activision they were just greedy and had to have sub goals.