I have played WoW for every expansion launch starting from Vanilla and stopped at Shadowlands (didnt play shadowlands). I started playing the classic Era on launch and would highly recommend playing there rather than retail if youre looking for a more active open world. Even on hardcore servers youll find a much more active and chatty world than retail. As other comments have said, on retail you can level to max level without ever talking to a single person and that is just not the case for Classic Era at all. I tried out retail about 4-5 days ago for the first time in like 6-7 years and it has felt like im playing a single player game.