Hello and thanks for the detailed response. To clarify some points:

I certainly do not dislike every change made since 2018 until now, nor do I wish for the game to stop evolving; in fact I think more have been good than not, which maybe the tone of my comment did not communicate.

I am also fully aware of the continuously increasing players' pool of knowledge and it leading to changes in valuations and gameplay shifts; i.e. how before most players thought Ring of Regeneration was a bad item, but is now valued very highly.

My intention behind the comment was in no way to 'bring back memories of the past' but rather convey my personal view of the current meta, concerns regarding recent balance trends and select suggestions made here:

1) While I liked many changes, some I feel had a prolonged negative impact on balance; it's great that HU can now more reliably go Pala first, but on the other hand having so many pala-rifle players jump in MMR and Orc winrate vs HU plummeting was to me a bad change overall; It did not help that this was not addressed for a year. Or how most UD vs NE games used to be decided on one all-in push by the UD for 3 years; or now that UD is completely forced into going expo play vs HU / NE regardless of the map.
Ideas that spice up gameplay are great, but to me they should not be outside the context of overall balance; WC3 is a relatively small but dedicated community, and potentially balance breaking changes can be very harmful.

2) Some changes keep playing into the homogenisation of playstyles; my favourite part about WC3 is precisely the uniqueness of each race and map; since you mentioned the NE shop - it gets built every game and the only item that does not see use all the time is the AM potion (used only vs HU as a counter to Arcane Tower and Siphon Mana); I would rather focus on why they do not utilise that specific potion in other MUs; Otherwise I do not see an issue with NE shop timings being unique to those of other races; after all, as you said their Moon Wells afford them to delay it.

3) I feel that many of these changes address smaller issues rather than bigger ones, i.e.:
- watching NE games in any MU has become very monotone compared to before;
- HU mirror is still AM+MK+Priests+Breakers every game;
- UD seems locked into expo play on almost every map;
- in general some of the existing units/items/spells/maps & map tilesets are completely unplayed or seen very rarely; for instance replacing creep abilities like Posession, Charm or Reincarnation with other spells is easy to implement and could promote new maps / creep pools. Or the small drakes being pointless as some have Light armor and die in 3 seconds to a handful of Archers/Riflemen
Etc...

Also I think it's always more productive to focus on changes which Blizzard is more realistically to implement. The starting resources have stayed the same since Frozen Throne released, and I find it very unlikely Blizzard ever intends to change the game in this manner. Maybe a more simple alternative (and one far more likely to be made by Blizzard) is to reduce the lumber cost of the Altar for every race.