There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?

Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.

Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.

Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.

(Well, that was how I saw it anyway).