The repair speed on EU1 is also reduced to 1.
At least give it a try if it works?
The defender alliance reacts in seconds as they are in a discord call, draining takes 6 minutes with this speed (on excellent gates, which are rare and alliance tends to keep them on lower yield). There is basically no point to try, it was hard enough with 4 minute drain time (remember, 0 or 1 gate taken during that whole update). Repair also takes only 1 player, even a low level or an alt can do it, so the defenders can still move freely.
The previous draining/repair speed was adequate for a small group of attackers to get 1-5 gates during each attack session (is that really too much?), which they will certainly lose during the next one as it's impossible to defend it from a large alliance. The thing is even if the attackers would be able to take a whole map it doesn't matter much, as they will
100% lose it during the next, so they can only get so much.
On other less populated servers we succeeded in taking almost entire maps (so not a skill issue) with just a few(3-5) low level players, so this update is impossible to be balanced without constant adjusting for the current population of each server.
You might also say to just get more clans on the attacker side. There are no more, the playerbase is very limited, same people for years.