Look at the stacked population graph to get an idea of the size of the catastrophe.
That's quite an interesting exercise. Dwilight's population fell from 2.4M to 1.9M, a 500K drop.
But if you look at just two realms, Asylon and D'Hara, you see that their combined population dropped from 330k to only 80k. Almost 40% of the lives lost were among them.
Even better, if you remove Asylon, D'Hara, and Barca, PeL and Summerdale (dead or mostly dead realms), then the total population only drops from ~1.9M to ~1.8M.
It seems the hardship was really not equally shared.