It kind of seems that you want to believe that retail had as much of a ninja problem as warmane does. I'll assure you that wasn't the case in my experience on multiple realms and factions during the time.
I'd also like to point out that RDF didn't exist until 3.3.0 (when ICC came out). In order to gear characters, or do daily heroic quests, you had to form groups yourself; typically that meant making friends with people and running with guildies. In addition, current-tier raids were seldom cleared by PuGs, meaning being in a guild was much more important during retail than it is now. I'll reiterate what I said earlier, being a ninja or toxic in groups when you're the odd man out was a quick way to get you blacklisted by a guild and any other guild they're friends with. That was significant because most realms only had about 10 or so guilds per faction full-clearing normal content, and less than half of those were doing significant hard modes or heroics.
There are also other things to consider when you're speculating about the 'chaos' that went on during retail:
Servers were broken up by region, meaning you were extremely unlikely to be playing with people that didn't speak the same language as you. With no language barriers, it was easier to communicate what items people were searching for and what loot rules were. Speaking of loot rules, when RDF came out, it was automatically set to Need Before Greed loot, which unlike the previous poster said, actually came out in patch 1.9
https://www.engadget.com/2009-12-08-...de-page-2.html
Furthermore, blizzard never officially released server population / cap during wotlk, only total players per region. If you do the math (just for NA), it averages to about 10k accounts in total to each realm. If you omit the fact that outliers would exist (realms with 15k+ or <3k accounts on it) and just consider the average of TOTAL accounts is 2k less than warmane claims to have on at any given time, you might understand that there was a larger feeling of community on retail. You didn't have to organize a bulletin board and realm government to blacklist toxic people and ninjas, word just made its way around because pretty much everyone knew everyone.
Lastly, as far as your philosophical standpoint goes, there was a point in time where humanity didn't have "general laws to unite its citizens." It's called the stone age.