i suspect the womens tour played the showed "efforts" card last year, they were signed up with GCN/Eurosport for live coverage and had announced it, similar to this years efforts, but had to can it at the last minute due to the costs and lack of consistent 4g signal on the route, and probably claimed it was an exceptional year due to covid, just to get a race run at all was probably an achievement.
I dont know why Ride London has WWT status, the classique crit was never of the level required, even if the Madrid crit as part of the Vuelta had WWT status, but I suspect them losing the mens race forced them to focus more on the WWT instead, prize pots it was 60,000 euros this year not the 100,000 it once was, its still more than most races for sure but riders have always said forget about the prize money, they want live tv coverage instead.
and shutting down central london isnt as costly as you might think as TfL are very helpful in that regards, in that they have a pot of money each year to spend on things that will attract tourists to London, this kind of thing falls under that so TfL cover most of the costs for you, thats arguably why it stays in London, or that London "attracts" these kinds of races, because actually elsewhere in the UK that kind of tourist fund doesnt exist, so councils or sponsors are having to pay the costs themselves.
with the BBC, its more about having any live sport to show thesedays, though the week after next, it will be wall to wall coverage of tennis for two weeks, but yeah the main channels rarely are cleared except for football, they even invented a new format of cricket just so the BBC could show it live on a main channel and not worry about running over time schedules, they seem to think the average viewer cant concentrate on anything for more than 45mins at a time, so showing a full cycling stage live is out.
why in this digital channel era they never just created a BBC Sports channel and just put sports there I dont know, but as I say alot of the live sport they claim to show live these days is shuffled over to the Red Button channel, or iplayer online, though its infrequently advertised