I think the explanation is right here…a galleon in real life is a ship that can easily transport hundreds of people. Being large, I think it could easily carry 300-500 orcs at least. Since there was a fleet of them, I would say there was at least from 10 to 20 galleons…you do the math, and the result is actually thousands of orcs, a number that is feasible with the orcish population imprisoned in the internment camps in my opinion.
Then once in Kalimdor, after settling down in Orgrimmar, their population was able to increase exponentially under the right conditions, as Orcs are a race that can grow up and mature even faster than Humans.
I think we should take into consideration the pre-Scourge population of Quel’thalas as well…we are talking of an isolationistic Kingdom that basically suffered only two major wars in 7000 years before the Scourge came, and in both of those wars the High Elves cleverly let the Humans took the brunt of the majority of their losses against the Trolls and later the Orcs.
Add to that the High Elves in Warcraft are not necessarily subjected to the general fantasy tropes of elves who are long-lived but few in numbers and having low birth rate (the high elven kids can grow up and mature just as fast as the humans ones, and their families can actually be big with 4 children and a lot of relatives like the Windrunner one), and in my opinion it’s not impossible that pre-Scourge they had a population of hundreds of thousands of people, maybe up to a million.
For example 10% of a million would still make a total population of 100k, which, while still low of course, it’s still a quite solid foundation to start to slowly regrow their population and rebuild their kingdom.
I wanted to reply in detail… but you’re just proving my points about the power of headcanon. Since Blizzard doesn’t care, you can pretty much make up your own numbers. So… they don’t matter. There will always be as many or as little orcs, elves, humans or dwarves as they want in that moment. And there will always people willing to try their hand at mental feats of strength to justify it from one event to the next.
However I certainly agree with you with about the fact that for Blizzard racial numbers absolutely do not matter as they do not want to deal with the repercussions of the story on them, so the Kaldorei population is still safe despite their current predicament.
doubt the elven population was even that big to start with immortality tend to breed the mentality that you don’t need to create the next generation so you have a bunch of 10000 year old elves that never did it
heck look at their leaders they been together how long and all they have is a adopted daughter
a note on westfall the king did send relief supplies but vanessa vancleef keeped stealing it for her revenge against stormwind what better way to recruit for the defias brotherhood then to claim the king has abandoned his people and use the very supplies he sent to build a new brotherhood