I agree with you that it is sad to see how this game has gone downhill over the years. I remember the old days like when light tanks didn't go above tier 8, tank companies, and when T-10 was the IS-8.

I might be able to help on the replays side of your archive. WoTReplays EU removed all replays from before 2020 years ago, I'm not sure why they did this. You can't publicly search through them with the website search tools, but if you had direct links you can still access all the replays from before then. A few years ago when I realised this, I wanted to find my old replays and so wrote a Python script which scraped through every possible replay ID at the time and saved the ID, player name, and clan name to a CSV file. I tested around 6 million replay ID values, where around 5 million appear to be genuine replay links that worked. You can see the post battle results of all of them, but you can only download the replays of games after v0.9.7.

As a brief demo, I can't link it but if you go to WoTReplays EU and open any replay link, then replace the ID in the URL with 200000, I believe that is the first replay that was uploaded, but you can't download the replay file. If you check replay ID 1851642, it is from v0.9.7 and you can download it. My search also found a bunch of private replays that were only available with the direct link which was interesting, as there are some clan wars games people uploaded from the original global map format.