I’m pretty sure the myriad WoW Classics are money-laundering operations. I’ve known several guilds over the Classic revivals since 2019 and every single member is buying gold. The bots are egregiously obvious and Blizzard only patches the game if people are making too much gold, not if the bots are spoiling the experience.
It’s possible that Blizzard just happens to be incompetent in the exact way that would perfectly support money laundering but…big coincidence if so.
It might be true that that's how most of the money gets made on them now, but famously for many years they refused to try to make such a thing officially, so I doubt that was the nominal reason to start them.
I wonder what makes botting that much more trivial/productive on Classic.