Ask HN: Why does it feel like MMO server tech hasn't changed?

So this comes from the recent Release of New World from Amazon. They have a hard cap of 2k players and 2-3x that per server I'm queues. They are adding more servers often but usually not enough.

Now, I love the MMO genre and have been through many MMO launches, and this isn't new to me. But as a DevOps engineer, I wonder how we haven't improved server tech to minimize or remove this?

I don't know much about MMO servers out outside of the one I'm building for an old MMO, but I feel like a new modern MMO should have some innovations to solve server capacities or so many servers.

Why does it feel we have made no progress towards limitless servers, or single world games where you have fleets of servers handling 1 world? Why are we still separating players by servers and not employing phasing to help with clutter of people seen.

Or move characters to be disconnected from the world they play on. So I can freely choose the server I play on regardless of my character. Server choice can be more easily changed without starting over.

I understand the complexities of latency, server to server syncing, database capacity limits, etc. But I feel like those actually making MMO servers for a living have the expertise to make this better.

And then there is Amazon, they have the entire power of AWS to add servers quickly. I don't get how they can't have scaled extra servers on day 1 and day 2 with some cloudformation, terraform, docker, kubernetes, or whatever is the right tool for quick provisioning. They are adding 20 servers at a time. There are more people queued than playing atm.

Just want to start a discussion to see more view points, maybe some expertise of those working on MMO game servers, etc. There is obviously things I'm not aware of or not taking into account, but I would like to know.