This makes a lot of sense actually. I don't like it; but it makes sense with the direction Blizz has been going of wanting to keep numbers to themselves in recent years in general.
Important note: this also blocks the addons used by the goldsellers to invite people in their chats and also block the guild mass invite addons. I think their target was more this behaviors then the ones in your post. As far as I know both use /who to populate lists of invites into guilds/chats.
Wow they really are desperate for people to not know how much more popular Classic is than BFA, huh?
Why is the assumption that this was intended to break Census add-ons?All we know for certain is that the SendWho() function is protected. Many add-ons used this besides the census add-on. I think it's much more likely this was done to interfere with guild invite add-ons or gold-site spammers.
Removed
Seems like something fishy is going on. The fact that Blizz is trying to hide player number is not conspiracy theory, it is a fact. And you don't need to think twice about why investor and shareholder based corporation would need to do that. I mean they already did stop reporting them once, which is also a fact.
proof Classic is already dying
The optics on this are terrible.
Lol I love this one
My most innocent theory is that it's to stop automated gold seller whispers.But I'm deeply cynical that this isn't just Bliz wanting to obscure data that players & investors might use to judge how popular the game is at any given time... any player who's had much experience with their CS process knows Bliz's approach to transparency is poor.TBH I could see some people in the company's hierarchy justifying doing it for the first reason but regarding the second result as a bonus. They're not a monolith, decisions can be argued for different reasons at different levels.