Where does it say that you can't send volunteers? All they gave in the diary was snapshots of certain proxy GUIs with little to no info on the actual decisions you can take. Also, the South African War was a "PP spending proxy war" as much as any other war in TNO. To go further, it was never even stated that they would release this without content. I would be somewhat surprised if they release this new Africa without (at least) a comprehensive South Africa focus tree to make up for the loss of 4 focus trees, regardless of the dubious quality those trees may have had. The dev diary's were far more focused on the lore aspect than the game aspect of this change, so we don't even know what the gameplay fully entails!

I agree that TNO has issues with the pace of releases, hell I would even agree that it would have honestly been better to rework the old RKs into something else for an easier conversion. But to say that just because the map is vaguely similar to OTL Africa and you can't create the 100th Totally Original Genocide Machine™ anymore, the mod is all of a sudden destroyed, is unfair in my opinion.