Your little story doesn’t say anything about anything. Sure, the sociological patterns were different, but that’s because the norms were different.
A way to achieve a middleground, without pleasing casuals like you and turning it into retail, would be realm only matchmaking which was the matchmaking used for most of vanilla as a whole. That, and lowering the realm population caps to true vanilla numbers.
Because with fewer people you get less reliable queues so the gameplay experience becomes more varied for many, and due to the natural formations of social networks it’d be like comparing casual guilds to hardcore guilds.
The hardcore social groups would push those premades just like now on their servers, while the casual groups would rather just solo queue or queue with only a few.
But because this matchmaking system from retail is so asocial and there’s just one big melting pot of premades, it means the range of opponents each BG gets has a greater variety. So this “greater variety” with WORSE conditions for teamwork to form naturally between strangers (as explained in Old battlegroups compared to now ) this makes premades a more regular occurrence since it’s more encouraged by more people getting more frustrated, especially with more platforms to compete with others across realms. Back then you only competed with your own realm in this stage of the game, very few were even aware of the “world race”.
As @Thefilth mentioned, this is also the first waves of rankers. They’ll decrease over time. So give it time instead of crying like a baby dropping its bottle.
As already stated this is a sociological pattern which is different from back then. Changing an online game’s design is a HUGE step to address sociological patterns forming, when it doesn’t break the game’s explicitly stated rules to do so in the first place. It’d be like them removing raids if nobody in the world would enter them. Kind of a big step to take.
The premade exploits all depends on methods to decrease the pool of potential players you can get matched up with in a single moment to vastly increase the chance of ending up in the same BG as your premade. So it’s not just as simple as “joining up at the same time” for most (except Russian realms).
But since you already seem to have accepted the inevitability of such, the solution is simple.
A solo queue for the casuals like yourself, where you get no rewards. No honor, and no rep.
Those are rewards which others needs to go through the real matchmaking process and succeed in to get, or get it the slower way by losing. So there’s no reason for there to be an “easy mode option” for people to get it in a much simpler way.
Because the key is to remove the motivation to perform premade exploits when such a matchmaking system is intended to prevent premades from queuing.
It’s what kept it away for so long in retail as well.
As you said yourself, it was “just for fun” or for some early rewards is all, after they had disabled this ranking system.