Check out BF2Hub. The community isn't big, but you can generally find a server or three with real players in it (just look for players with a ping; 0 ping means a bot).

BF2 was great, BF3 was definitely better, not that there was anything at fault of BF2.

I disagree with Fortnite and PUBG, whilst PUBG is a little clunky it did usher in a completely new game style AND importantly introduced much better situational audio which other games didn't have.

I miss the squad gameplay of Battlefield 2 too. It hasn't been replicated since, in my opinion, and subsequent Battlefield titles changed the classes and made the available loadout options too flexible to require specialized play.