About BA, spring 103 didn't get banned, it just got restricted to rooms with 8 players max for autohosts (i think).
Also, this limitation refers to a particular BA version, 9.46, which many people stuck to, BA community has had BA 10.x to play with the later engine versions and could have easily stuck with it instead and made balance adjustments if necessary.
Evo rts got a popularity spike when it did a steam release a few years before ZK and brought many players into spring games, although with some confusion. It still has some activity on the discord channel, but indeed seems to have little pvp games on the spring server. It's kind of sad seeing people calling it "irrelevant".