But there are other projects of certain people on your realms called guilds; small projects of their own leader teams that they dedicate(d) years of their life into managing and making them work and progress. They are the backbone of any realm and without them things become empty and most of the game loses value for the players. Now what guilds and their leaders and members need is enough members to support guild events happening - mostly raid events, and they need manpower to replace old members who quit the game from time to time. So there needs to be some balance between people who quit and people who join.
Now, the thing is, from your post guild leaders can read the following (I am paraphrasing): "Meh, doesn't really matter if people leave and population drops to an unsustainable level causing most of the guilds to disband, as long as we have some guilds remaining and keeping the raid business at top end of the game active so that realm can continue to function. We've had low population before, we can have it again and survive and go on." You don't seem to understand what this looks like from the perspective of an average raider player, or battleground player. Every guild that the realm loses plants the seed in other guilds and every additional guild that leaves shortly after strengthens it. In short term one guild disbanding typically means that a small percentage of their players joins one of the other guilds who lack members and seemingly things become okay for a short while, but thinking that way completely neglects the fact that people become emotionally attached to the group of players they spend a lot of time with and most of those players lose a huge portion of their interest in the game resulting in most of them quitting for good; Or in case of whole guilds migrating to other realms they follow their old friends elsewhere. And again, there are no new players patching up the holes so eventually we arrive at the same situation again.
Our last serious application that was not due to a guild disbanding was September 3, 2016. This is almost 2 and a half months of only receiving applications from guilds disbanding.