Player-base down, servers still bad.

But, still, a queue to launch the game?

A queue isn't necessarily something that's going to disappear when you have less people playing. The infrastructure of game servers runs on the cloud these days. They dynamically change the required server capacity during the day. If there's a quick rise of players, they increase the capacity, but it isn't instantaneous. So while the capacity is spooling up, they put you in a queue. They usually don't take long. It usually consists of batches of 1200 players, where you have to wait a few seconds at most.

The whole Global Game Quota thing is a scam though. They claimed at release that every person would be able to host their own portal server. That was just a blatantly lie.

I feel like this is anecdotal.

I have had no issues with servers whatsoever, and have a consistent experience.  I play on PC with crossplay on. Of the matches I've had in 99 hours of playtime, one has been more bot-driven. 

And I feel like every single new game gets this "the game has declined in playerbase by X" statement. Of course it's gonna be popular when it starts. Almost every game-- especially every good game-- still has a playerbase drop where you find consistent players thereafter. Why? Because people figure out it's just not for them, or there's another new thing to go play like ARC Raiders. Even that is starting a downward trend.

It's not to say there aren't issues from time to time for some people, but to declare it as an absolute is a bit overzealous.

Sure. But the player base is down, and the servers are bad. Nothing anecdotal about it. I guess, if all you play is matchmake servers, everything looks rosey other than a rising bot population and increasing matchmake time.  The stuff you say is anecdotal is maybe in the game you don't play.

You can measure server frame time. You can see ping spikes. You can experience not being able to host or join a server that is supposedly persistent. You can see the error messages and the high ping. There is nothing anecdotal. You can tell that less people are playing. You can see that less people are playing. You can tell that things aren't improving. Instead of seeing the performance improve with reduced demand, performance is still bad and instead we are just seeing the negative effects of a reduced player base.