Hosting our own servers - why did it go?

Why did this get removed after BF4? Was it due to the cross play bullsh*t that isnt needed? We still host a BF server, you can remove cheats, toxic players, ban people who are racist, homophobic, wish cancer on others etc and keep it a fun community. This has been lost. It's too difficult to join with more than 3 friends onto the same server these days, so you cant build a community as easily. I have loads of friends who I saw back online for the BF6 beta, but due to the stupid limit of 4 in a party and the fact you cant join with other friends on the same server easily anymore, it just doesnt garner a happy playing experience anymore, no matter how good (or poor) the game. We have to put up with toxic abusive players, people being a**holes with how they play, and more importantly not being able to play with friends. Portal doesn't cut it as you cannot host a permanent server, if someone isnt on there it shuts down and the person who created it has to rehost it and you have to wait for them - whereas with your own server you could go on and let friends know and it would populate quickly. It's also much easier to admin. Am I the only one who thinks in a lot of ways the IP of Battlefield has gone backwards with regards playing with friends, and seems to be more geared to the I just jump on and play and dont care who I play with crowd, which seem to be more console based - or at least, this seemed to appear/occur as cross play became more of a thing considered important. Please EA give us back the ability to do this, it's not losing control and I don't see it would cause harm to the reputation (as thats low as can be anyway lately) as most servers are wll run with strong admin cutting out the racism, homophobic slurs etc.