If their servers worked at launch - yes. I think there would be hundreds if not thousands of players in mp right now even with the gradual combat fixes and how wonky stuff was at the start. The main reason the mp failed was that servers constantly crashed during the first week so that drove away probably 95% of players who were trying the mp out but decided not to play because of atrocious server performance. Then all we have left are the few dedicated players who also played warband and have very high expectations for the bannerlord combat, and it slowly devolves into a very negative overall game atmosphere. I'm not saying we needed custom servers at launch, but at least having working stable servers should have been a priority for taleworlds which they completely overlooked. Siege mode, which was the coolest mode for any new player to the franchise, just straight didn't work at launch because it was only ever tested for about 2 weeks in the mp beta.
Yes it is big sad. But like Morton said at least for the NA scene all the clans are pretty much gone so since there's nobody to match against there's no point in playing. Even the large skirmish draft tournament that was organized as a last effort died within the first few weeks. I highly doubt anything will change activity wise on the NA scene for clans until custom servers or battle mode releases.
I think it's pretty bad they're working on another project with the given state of the base game right now, for both multiplayer and singleplayer.
See the issue is that I think the developers thought the "competitive" community was way larger than it really was. I'd consider the majority of serious players in Warband to be "semi-competitive" (playing in a clan that took part in the large 100v100 event battles, or something like PW, etc.) and more played for the large battles and teamplay rather than the micro small scale combat. Then you have the casual players who just play on custom servers like tdm or siege just for fun. I'd say the semicompetitive and the casual players made up about 98% of the warband multiplayer community, so the "audience" TW was trying to cater to with the Bannerlord game modes was actually extremely small in the first place. Aside from the combat problems, a big reason Bannerlord mp died so fast is that the vast majority of players didn't get the modes or gameplay that made mount and blade unique that they liked back in warband.