The completely anecdotal evidence of "your friendslist" is hardly proof of anything. I have more people on my friendslist currently than I had for the entirety of WoD, that doesn't mean anything. Only Blizzard really knows with any amount of certainty how well the game is doing and since they no longer release the data we're left guessing. I'll say that if the mechanisms I mentioned weren't working we wouldn't have seen a majority of them carry over from Legion. Whether that's a bad or a good thing is entirely up individual preference, but I've found those who object to the way the game plays currently are also those who are more likely to have "WoW is dying" types of opinions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯