Would be worth adding in the stats for regular relays vs. team sprints as well as I think they've by and large been 50-50 lately since the relay was marginalised by the loss of a few major players' competitive standing, and the Team Sprint has taken off as an alternative to having actual depth of competition because they can have multiple entrants per nation to pad the startlist rather than the somewhat anæmic startlists we've seen in relays in recent years.
Of your examples, I think 2004 is about the right balance ratio-wise, because it allows a good spread of different distances and enough sprints to keep variety without turning the calendar into the repetitious mess it has been in recent years. While this year isn't necessarily so bad in and of itself, there have been a few years that have shown significant trend away from distance and toward sprints. 2013-4 springs to mind as especially bad, that was 11 sprints vs. 15 distance races, 9 of which were 10/5 or 15/10, and two others were sub-10km Tour de Ski stages (a prologue and the Alpe Cermis). The women had 3 15km races and a single, solitary 30km to give the distance specialists. 2018-19 had 12 sprints vs. 17 distance races, all but 3 of which were 15/10 (and one of those three was the Alpe). 2015-6 was overlong in terms of number of stages because of the Canadian Tour as it was a non-Worlds non-Olympics season, but that gave us 33 races of which 12 were sprints (there were 3 in the Canadian Tour), a better balance in terms of numbers but a huge number of sprint events on the surface (however they only had one Team Sprint last year as opposed to the usual two with an even split between normal relays and Team Sprints). Had the North American section of the calendar not been cancelled during the pandemic last season there would have been FOURTEEN sprints last season. Everything else was 15/10 or less, except two skiathlons, the Holmenkollen 50 and the Meråker pursuit.
I think the issue this season has also been exacerbated by some particularly poor placement of events on the calendar. In December you had a run of events which ran Sprint - 15/10 - Sprint - Team Sprint - Sprint, and at the moment we're halfway through a run of events which goes Sprint - Sprint - Team Sprint - Sprint, while the cancellation of Lillehammer has left us with only three events on the World Cup calendar all season that are not either sprints or 15/10, one of which, again, is the Alpe.
And yes, the only having 1 distance for a distance race (and that not being especially long either) is particularly bad as it removes the variety from the section of the calendar that can actually offer variety, whereas the sprints may give more immediate bursts of action but because they are all so short they largely feature the same kind of action, with the technique the main source of differentiation. If FIS are moving towards more sprint events because their concern is that distance is too predictable, then reducing the variety in the formats of distance racing is completely counterintuitive. And it only perpetuates the main problem that there's little reason to want to be a distance specialist, or there's little reason to persevere on the World Cup if you are a pure distance specialist. Homogenising all of the non-sprint races to be 15/10s and just varying whether they're mass start or individual start with the former being preferred will only continue the status quo, especially among the women where often mass start races follow one of two formats: if the course is challenging, Johaug just skis away from everybody at the start and stays away, and if it isn't then the sprinters stay in the pack and then win, further reducing the chances for a non-sprinter to bother.
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