I must have missed this, BFA was surrounded by negativity from Beta onwards. Before the expansion came out, before any of my friends got to try it, we were hyped, war mode sounded great, talks of air drops, world pvp was back, 2 new pieces of content, PvP rich expansion. But after a month our group was deflated and barely hanging on, once we cleared HC uldir, our guild died and my friends quit the game.
Once the patch notes of 8.1 were coming alive, no one was hyped by anything, the big release was a new warfront, our guild had the same issue in legion but when 7.1 came out, we got ToV, Karazhan. Contrast that to 5 more quests added to the war campaign and the darkshore warfront. I question whether Mechagon was meant to come out in 8.1 but Blizzard were just too far behind at that point and delayed it.
Either way, my group of friends didn't return the whole expansion, even when it did improve slightly later on.