I think the conclusion we can come to is that the WoW team's commentary for design decisions they implement into the game are whatever fits the bill at the moment.
Ion was already shown to have said Zandalari won't get dinosaur forms outside of a travel form raptor, then Zandalari got them (due to player outcry obviously).
Danuser just recently came out and said Sylvanas was written to be like Garrosh 2.0 intentionally, "but with nuance" aka don't kill her in the expansion she premieres as a villain. So they denying her being Garrosh 2.0 was a straight up lie too.
With Patrick Dawson's comment on cross-faction for Ion's as another example of devs changing their mindset (just like Alex's response to High Elves vs Ion's), we can come to a conclusion based on the patterns above:
The team will defend whatever decision they make for the game at present until they simply don't defend it anymore.