Trust me. Healers are needed. If they die and your party does not consist of a summoner or red mage everyone will willingly wipe to go again. Despite classes having self-sustain majority are not going to use them to try and continue the fight without the healer unless the tank is a sadist. It's going to be a restart so that the healers can focus solely on their HP while everyone else does the damage. Healers not being needed are not the problem.
The problem is the lack of engagement. There's virtually no reward system for doing well as a healer. I'm slowly learning about raiding. So I can probably guess that the hardcore raiders probably lost this after HW (don't know, never played during that time). If not, they probably never had a rewards system to begin with. As for casual content, it was there in SB. If you needed the extra defense you had it. If the party was fine however...Mismia II, Bane, Aero III, Holy Spam for the stuns, etc. I think healers wasn't balanced then (SCH especially the more I think about it), but for the most part they were engaging.
I have healer anxiety. However, I would have continued to learn how to heal if they didn't take away the engagement part. Your current reward for keeping your team alive is to spam one button regardless of whether you're dealing with mobs or a boss. I've got out beginning of ShB expansion, and I have not went back since. All of this just to make the class more accessible...
