Uh huh, they\re re-releasing classic out of the goodness of their hearts, because that’s what all multinational firms do.
On Spineshatter I was once killing bots all night on my rogue. Like a dozen of mages with weird names and absolutely identical behavior running around killing mobs, skinning them indefinitely. It’s just crazy we have the AI making videos but still can’t ban bloody bots.
They made/released Classic because they saw how popular Nostalrius was. Before Nost they didn’t believe there actually was a solid market for Vanilla. And it was a moderate success for a while, especially during Covid and with clone and boost sales in TBC Classic, and the new shop mounts and server transfer sales that came in TBC and Wrath.
But even now the majority of Classic players are on Pandaria, and Era / Anniversary is an absolute tiny fraction of their Retail an Pandaria income. Yes obviously they do it for money, but Era is a side project of a side project and it has virtually no shop sales, while some players pay their sub to also play Pandas or Retail. They are keeping Era up mostly out of inertia and because they made a promise they sort of would “forever”. I maintain, if they shut down Era servers tomorrow, their bottom line would barely change.
Remember back in Wrath retail, when the Celestial steed in the shop made them more money than StarCraft 2, the arguably best RTS ever made? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Era is a tiny insignificant fraction yes
MoP+Anni is approx 140k raiders logged + 75k raiders logged, according to ironforge.pro. In a challenging, competitive business environment, 100,000-200,000 accounts is not insignificant - then you have the bots that are only there because of the 100-200k.
I don’t have data for how many are raiding multiple chars, and how many aren’t raiding at all. I can guarantee you if 30,000 of those canceled their subs it would not go unnoticed. But people moaning on the forums here will certainly go unnoticed.
Oh, obviously, nobody but the ~50 regulars on here even read this forum, nobody paid by Blizzard has ever even seen this forum since the release of Classic.
I literally just go here to indulge my trolling so I don’t do it on my guild discord 
Most likely, it won’t end as a mere attempt.
The thing is, Blizzard can’t close servers outside of the US jurisdiction. They can threaten people into closure, but they can’t make them. Turtle owner is in Russia, so they can’t do anything with that. At best, Blizzard could get access down to the server in the US and maybe in the EU, forcing people to use VPNs or Turtle, adding new login servers.