Hello. Welcome back.
The GameSpy shutdown definitely hurt the BF2 community but I think it was the Revive shutdown that put in that final nail. When Revive closed they released (false) notices that it would no longer be possible to play BF2 (at all) and defamed, kicked, and/or banned people who attempted to correct the notice.
As for our servers: Two of them run bots so they'll never be empty with at least 1 human in them. xD The bots are ... well bots after all, they can be tough at times but aren't quite the same as playing with humans (they're very good in a pinch though to scratch that BF2 itch).