Yes, I know, it could easily be argued that BFA has long since overstayed its welcome, but since adopting its "near quarterly" cadence with legion, WoW has set a loose precedent of wanting something newish for players to look forward to every three months, raid tiers (or "seasons") lasting about six months, and expansions pretty close to two years.
And just over one week after the shadowlands stream set for this coming thursday, BFA's pre-patch has its two year anniversary. As of that point, every week without something new (like say, the pre patch) will be "felt" in the cadence established with Legion and generally kept in BFA.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that the pre-patch of shadowlands, if not the full-on pre-patch event, will have the longest run of any of its kind in a long time.
Think about it, if you count the various monthly buffs of XP, rep and now the timewalking event as the Q2 "events," and with Timewalking expiring in July, they currently have this long, dry Q3 of "literally nothing" between us and Shadowlands. I don't think that holds. I think we get a LONG pre-patch period, and a potentially extended pre-patch event. The only thing preventing myself personally from flat out predicting an early pre patch event is it's made no appearance on any testing servers that I'm aware of. But as Blizzard have shown, the "testing" they let us do is largely stress testing and marketing access, and the pre-patch event doesn't need months to bake on the PTR. The stream on thursday could very well be "aaand here we go, prepatch event on the PTR next week, patch drops early august, event shortly after!"
Also, the real test of the only thing really needing extensive testing that would come with the pre-patch, that being the leveling squish, would benefit from a longer lead-up to the expansion... because it's going to be broken, and it's going to get nip and tucked over the course of weeks once it's live. Everything pre-patch-relevant has been "tested" out by players for months now. They don't need our feedback on anything else coming with the pre-patch, aside from the adaptive mileage of the leveling squish on live servers.
So yeah, I thought that two year anniversary was worth pointing out, and how it fits with the cadence we've come to expect as of legion, and continued in BFA. This actual "drought" has been handled rather relatively well, blind hate aside, and as bad as BFA has been narratively, at least they seemingly got the expansion tail right... IF they don't let Q3 be just a bunch of "pray for beta invite."