Btw, I just checked the Shadowlands Alpha announcement back from 2020: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ne...veloper-update
Basically, they posted a blog post at Monday to announce that datamining would start on that day and invites would go out later that week. So, I imagine they would do the same again instead of a "surprise" alpha drop.
Or maybe they will have invites and datamining on the same day again and we may still get it this week.
*waves my hopium flags*