Not sure where you got 1% from? The cancellations at the time seemed much higher based on player login rates and I saw much larger numbers bandied about in the press.
I played during monocle-gate and during TEST's holding sovereignty down when they lost it all. Login rates went from peaking around 50,000 online at a time (and averaging above 35,000) to about 26,000 today. That's a huge drop.
500 cancelled in 2005 is 1%. It certainly were more than 500, don't get me wrong, but still the subs rate never dropped and in fact doubled that year.
I can't find anything about the loss of players due to that event in the link you sent. But you mentioned monocle-gate... we're talking about two different things here. I'm talking about the 2005 event when 500 players cancelled their sub which the article talks about. Monocle gate was more than half a decade later and not something I said anything about, the article does mention it but not in reference to the article's hyperbolic title which referred to the 2005 event after which, the article said, EVE was on 'the brink of destruction' and 'skirted apocalypse', which I'm disagreeing with.
Monocle gate was different, they actually lost significant subs (including myself, for that and other reasons). But even then they didn't skirt apocalypse. Subs didn't drop more than a few percent and they ended the year with more subs than they started.
EVE is definitely struggling with online users. But that's a function I think of the game's design and the nature of MMORPGs. Few people play for a decade, and there is an easy character transfer mechanism, and an easy way to buy ISK legally through plexes. In other words, it's relatively easy to buy characters and money nowadays. And when you do train, you may get a sub and just keep it offline to train. The entire entry game and mid game is basically useless for 95% of players. So you get high-end gameplay, which is mostly people who login every now and then to run some builds off a blueprint, fuel a tower, jump drive some freight, or login for a large alliance battle. You can sustain all this gameplay on very few logins. The days of many thousands of people mining, trading by traveling through gates instead of jumping around the universe, new players doing lvl 2-3 missions, piracy and small corp warfare etc are gone. It still exists, of course, but not at the scale it used to. It's too easy to mine & trade & build with fewer ships and in less time, leading to fewer logins, and fewer targets for pirates.
I played during monocle-gate and during TEST's holding sovereignty down when they lost it all. Login rates went from peaking around 50,000 online at a time (and averaging above 35,000) to about 26,000 today. That's a huge drop.
But don't take my word for it, read The Mittani's blog - he was mentioned in the article - https://www.themittani.com/features/graphing-eve-online-hist... - for yourself.