So to recap, in the last few years, Disney has:
- Given EMH & 60 day FastPass+ privileges to off-property hotels.
- Reduce evening EMH to 2 hours instead of 3
- Adding in "after hours events" so you can pay for more time than EMH would offer in the evening.
- Made the rooms arguably more generic and sterile.
And following COVID:
- Cut EMH & FastPass+
- Taken away free MagicBands (not a perk, but they acted like it was)
- Cut Magical Express
- Cut virtually all resort entertainment
So the question on my mind and probably many others' is: why stay at a Disney resort?
You forgot that they started charging for parking at the resorts.
I decided long ago that staying on site is almost never worth it and typically rent a house and a car for less than a room at a moderate resort.
That being said, Disney resorts were crowded before DME and I'm sure they'll be crowded after DME. When DME was started (2006 or so?), many (including me) called it a ploy to get people not to rent cars, thereby making them captive to eating, shopping, etc. on site. Back then, there were many fewer options for getting to WDW from the airport, and people sometimes rented cars because they were very cheap. Car rental prices are higher now, and Uber and Lyft make it much easier to get from the airport to WDW without a rental car. In addition, even if Disney convinces people not to rent a car, they aren't as captive, because calling an Uber to go off-site to eat is easy and not too expensive so there's less benefit.