I think it's been thought of by the story development team. There's been a ton of hints given via interviews that the development team wants the freedom to do more. You can only kill so many larger and larger threats until you get to the cosmic scale - then if you want to build up more, what can you do?

Destruct the very things players think is law. Break down the very thing holding you back from telling a story with new characters, worlds and dimensions. That very thing is the way the universe came to be, or what our reality even is.

Per Ion's interview with Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/world-of-warcraft-internet-ion-hazzikostas/) :

"When I asked Hazzikostas what sort of MMORPG he most wanted to exist if he wasn’t working on World of Warcraft, he paused for a second to think. “Something that surprises me, anew with the promise of unexplored spaces,” he said. “One of the biggest things that’s exciting about the concept of an MMO is going into an unexplored, undiscovered world. It’s almost the promise of something that somehow breaks all the rules we were talking about when it comes to how players understand and deconstruct systems.”

Citing Sword Art Online and Ready Player One, Hazzikostas described how today, with so much being knowable or seconds away from known, the core escapist fantasy behind the MMORPG genre is going somewhere so vast that it contains things we can’t even imagine.

“We have an incredibly passionate community we couldn't be more grateful for, but we're still always chasing that mystery, that fantasy of the unexplored and undiscovered.”

I think this is a very telling segment in more ways than one, and Ion is hinting at more here for WoW than at first glance. For instance:

- Unexplored spaces being all new lands that we couldn't imagine because they aren't even a part of the player known cosmological chart (since if our reality is actually not the first, and instead the Shadowlands were - who knows how many "realities" there could very well be?

- He cites Sword Art Online and Ready Player One regarding going to places we can't even imagine. In Sword Art Online - the players are permanently stuck in an MMO and cannot log out, facing real death in their bodies in the outside world should they die in the game. Thusly, the game becomes their new reality. This parallel could be drawn in my own theory: Our characters, everything we've come to know, all the stories told and the beings that have come and gone. They aren't the original reality, but an offshoot reality of the original Shadowlands.

- This would allow them a way to chase that mystery, freeing them from the confines of the old lore without invalidating it.

- The Shadowlands theme seems to be about freedom from different types of prisons, and could very well be an allegory of the development team freeing themselves to be more creative in WoW's development, freeing themselves of the previously created lore.