Isn't that even worse? That would require even less resources on EA's part, and is even less consequential to the actual game.
They weren't exactly "homemade" servers either. There was an entire industry of game server rentals and these were datacenter rack servers connected to fat pipes.
It wasn't unusual at all to find third-party servers with way better pings (and higher player caps) than the official servers.
I don't remember the official bf1942 servers ever having 32v32 player matches but that was fairly common for thirdparty servers for example.