Everything would be better if every BF6 player just used Portal.

Yes, exactly.

Yes, it is easy to find verified-mode servers with full XP.  Click filter, maps & modes, and select conquest, breakthrough, and rush checkmarks (and battle royale, if you want to play battle royale through a community server -- which probably are none -- for some reason), and that's it. Every server listed will be verified-mode with full XP.  Add the filter to only show servers with 1-5 or 6-10 free slots, it you want to remove a bunch of empty servers from the list. It's just a few clicks and not complicated at all, despite people's complaints about how supposedly hard it is to use the server browser. Do NOT select tags as a filter item, since the tag filtering seems to be broken and usually finds no results.

The problem is that there’s no one playing to start with.

That could be true. I have pretty much stopped playing as well. But, when I tried a couple weeks ago, I had no problem finding a desirable server any time I wanted to join one. I would be surprised if the server population dropped that much in such a short time, but maybe. The only time I had trouble finding a server is when I made mistakes with invalid map selection or tried to find servers using server tags (until I realized that is a broken feature).

The real problem is that at no time has any substantial amount of the playerbase tried to use community servers to solve the problems they complain about. There is a constant barrage of misinformation on the subject in any social media you read. The number of people parroting the same wrong talking points makes it hopeless to try to correct. Community or persistence or playing with friends is dead and only something people pretend they want when they are in the mood to rant about the choices they made; and they refuse to be corrected or accept the solution they never attempted. And if you do finally get a person to engage, listen, and consider what you said, their furst response is that it is too hard or they don't bother because the population is too low. They refuse to see that the people who constantly complain about matchmaking could easily become the missing population if any of them actually cared about the thing they complain about. You can't fix laziness and the privileged belief that it is EA's job to force them into the correct persistent community server with one click, as if EA can read their mind and as if BF3 or BF4 didn't have the same requirement to browse a server list and apply filters to find what is wanted. Community servers have turned into PVE servers since PVE players are the only ones who don't care that no one else joins, while PVP players all stand in the shadows scared of the empty dance floor.