I had the same issue.
I got the game file folder form me work laptop , there was not a problem of the “initializing” there. ( you may get it from a friend, its 80Gb file)
I got the same problem again, the battlenet still need to do the “initializing”. After trying may solution and nothing was working. I wish to be able to run the game with out battlenet like old days, google it and there it was! The .exe file to run the game is locked in the game file (usually “C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft_retail_”)
I had the battelnet open when I click to run the WoW.exe. from excitement I lower the game window and show that the battlenet was ready to click the play bottom. Not sure if the manual running of WoW.exe unstuck the battlenet but ether way you may be able to play the game if you find the updated file of it.
You… can…
Just go into the installation folder and double click on the Wow64.exe file. But if the game is out of date, then you will just get “Incompatible” realms, and YES, you need battlenet to update it. No more patchfiles available to the public.
Returning to the game (clean install) and also getting this issue. Tried everything I’ve seen posted and no dice. Pretty sure this must be a bug in their software at this stage.
Windows and all drivers up to date (including .NET framework).
Excluded all Battlenet/Blizzard folders from antivirus
Completely removed all files and reinstalled.
For what it’s worth, i tried all the solutions in any forum and absolutely nothing worked. However, after reinstqlling battle net for the millionth time, i decided to randomly turn off my wifi on my computer and turned it on again, and the update just continued. Like i didn’t just spend 2h trying to fix things 
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