So I'm talking to this hoe named Delphine and dis [censored] tells me dragons are coming back to life. Ok.. so how come Nirn isn't getting raked by dragons? Or is it....

Point being... shouldn't dragons been ruling mankind and destroying mjor settlements like Whiterun like back in the Dragon War? Riddle me this Bethesda

You can talk to hoes? By the ten, I'm goi- Waaait, I haven't seen one since Oblivion.

By Malacath I oughtta-

Well supposedly their rule in the Olden Days was upheld by a powerful elite class of dragon priests and worshippers who were able to keep the oppressed populace in line through, presumably, violence and intimidation. In other words, the human rulers were in on the deal and the amount of actual "enforcing" the dragons had to do was probably minimal... just enough to remind everyone what they were capable of doing, if anybody got any uppity ideas about overthrowing the leaders of the dragon cult and ending the oppression.

Those rulers are gone, if a dragon attacks now the people in charge aren't gonna say "oh look you all better start worshipping dragons again or else," no, the dragons are attacked and killed if possible just like any other dangerous wild creature that is becoming a problem. If the dragons are gonna try and reestablish their rule over mortals, they're on their own this time and they've lost the divine street cred they once had, mortals just see them as one more wild critter that has to be taken down and not gods to be feared and worshipped "just because." And I would suspect that in the game they are far fewer in number than they would have been at the time of the Dragon War. Plus many of them are apparently tasked with guarding word wall locations, possibly because Alduin knows early on that there's a Dragonborn about who is a threat to his plans and who will become a bigger threat if his/her access to words of power goes unchecked.

You seem to have an unleahty obsession with gardening tools.

The dragons do attack the settlements, though. Helgen was a major town.