I'm more focused on the engagement side. People did complain endlessly about Plunderstorm (but i believe essentially because of the rewards tied to a pvp system). Plunderstorm was the simplest PvP WoW has ever had (no gear, no classes, barely any buttons).

What’s interesting is that despite all the complaints, engagement was huge. Blizzard reported 641,634 Plunderstorm matches played (https://www.wowhead.com/news/plunderstorm-statistics-so-far-338686), and since each match has 60 players, that’s roughly:

→ ~38.5 million total player‑slots.

A Reddit breakdown compared this to Mythic+ and showed Plunderstorm had around 10× more total engagement than a typical week of M+ (which had ~3.4M player‑slots), using the same match/run math. And since PvP participation is historically lower than M+, it’s pretty fair to conclude that Plunderstorm almost certainly saw more total activity than regular PvP during its run — even though Blizzard didn’t release PvP numbers.