We were there last week as well, and it is definitely very crowded. As others have noted, the lack of entertainment, character meet-and-greets, and shows means that far more people are competing for the same spaces and attractions, so everything feels busier wherever you go. And when a big people-eater like Pirates goes down, as it did for much of our first day at MK, everything else spirals from there.
I did also notice, though, that actual wait times were consistently MUCH lower than the posted waits. For several attractions, a 40-minute posted wait time actually meant only 15-20 minutes in line. I eventually gave up on WDW's posted waits and just relied on the Touring Plan Lines app, which ended up being more accurate despite being just a general estimate.
I realized why that was when I went through the queue for Kilimanjaro Safari: those standby queues are NOT designed to hold the entire throughput of the attraction, and it causes major crowd control issues when they do, so they overestimate the wait times to scare people away and keep it from being even worse.
Kilimanjaro Safari has an hourly capacity of 3,000 people. If 2/3rds of capacity is dedicated to FastPass+ that means about 1,000 people/hour are expected to move through the Standby queue. That Standby queue may hold less than 1,500 people or so (rough estimate based on the time spent once we actually entered the "normal" queue area), so with FastPass+ running they might have space for a 90 minute wait in the Standby queue.
But when there is no FastPass+ queue, all 3,000 people move into a physical space that was not designed to hold them, and they spill out into the rest of the park. If there are 3,000 people in line (60 minute wait) then more than 1,500 people are in the extended queue, spilling out in the park!
On Kilimanjaro, the queue was posted as 75 minutes (3,750 people) and started at Tusker House, switched back down by Festival of the Lion King, and even ran through an ugly backstage industrial area (eww!) before entering the queue. And that was for an
actual wait of "only" 50 minutes (2,500 people). If the wait was
actually 75 minutes, I have no idea where they would put everybody.
Without FastPass+, they really only have physical space for a 30-minute queue, but of course
everybody would ride the Safaris if the wait is only 30 minutes, and that would be unmanageable. So they lie to guests, consistently overestimating wait times to scare folks away and keep the miserable extended queues barely manageable. (Here is an article with some photos of the awful Safaris queue experience -- I was truly horrified.)
https://www.kennythepirate.com/2021...om-attraction-is-now-using-a-backstage-queue/
I noticed the same thing on Pirates of the Caribbean, where the posted 45-minute wait actually took less than 20 minutes, but even at that point the queue almost backed up into the street.
This experience has me convinced that FastPass+ definitely
will come back, and will likely have at least half of ride capacity dedicated to it on most attractions (e.g. not just as a super-expensive add-on to a minority of users). They just do not have the physical space in those queues to do it any other way.
