With personnel issues it’s usually HR that ties everyone’s hands.
We know for certain that was absolutely not the case with Blizzard, so let's be very clear that you are incorrect to assert or imply that was the case here.
We know that in fact Blizzard lost countless HR people because they were having their hands tied by management who were unwilling to back them up, and unwilling to punish the wrongdoers, and even at some points management seem to have directly managed cover-ups. Further HR always serve at the pleasure of management. If they're not doing what management wants, for good or bad, they're going to end up stymied or out of the business - I've seen it happen. If HR are blocking stuff, it's because management wants them to - and management will be aware (again, we know they were here).
Hight wasn't at the very top of the company (albeit pretty damn close), but he was absolutely in a position where he was extremely aware of a culture of misogyny and racism (and to some extent homophobia/transphobia) which was present at Blizzard and within the WoW team and leadership, and had been present for a long time. It seems like it came to the fore when Blizzard started going big with WoW, and I suspect that's because Rob Pardo lead Blizzard into some very very bad hiring practices, and they needed to hire a lot of people for WoW, so they basically hired a lot of poorly qualified or even unqualified frat bro-types (many frat bros always have been nerds, note, just more alcohol-soaked that we are perhaps accustomed to), literally because they "fit well into Blizzard's culture".
He was in charge, for example, when the attempted rapist whose attempted rape was covered up by Blizzard, was
directly reporting to him (Hight). Most of the people who were part of "Cosby Suite" crowd reported directly to Hight, or were reporting directly to the people who reported directly to Hight.
Obviously we can't say "Oh Hight was fine with it". Perhaps he was seething constantly for < checks notes > 10 years whilst he was technically in a position to I dunno, fire the hell out of these people. But certainly we can say that, from the various investigations, it doesn't seem like he actually
did anything about it. Blizzard did eventually act, but only after the allegations became really seriously damaging.
As a player, I don't make enough choices to actually be invested, or feel somehow culpable for what happens in the storyline.
I think that's true of most MMORPGs and the people playing them, but it's definitely
not true of how most people regard CRPGs, and that's incredibly easy to see if you go to any forum, subreddit, Discord or the like relating to a game - or just talking to people about them IRL, including the sort of people who never post on the internet except maybe family photos on FB/Insta (depending on their age). Most people do get pretty invested in CRPGs especially Bioware ones. SWTOR also managed this to some extent by having a story much more like a Bioware CRPG (and tailored to each class).
Not to mention what has to be a crushing amount of legacy code debt rooted in the faction concept, even if (as I suspect) they would love to finally unite the factions both in lore and mechanically.
I think this is the actual main reason. They're constantly removing barriers, but the game was basically built split and it would be very hard to remove that split completely. The fans who are obsessed with it are relatively small in number and many of them don't actually play the game, just talk smack about it (or only play Classic, which would be unaffected).
