You say, "stepped on the toes of healers"; I say "saved healers from spending a GCD on Esuna".
The problem with Erase was never that it was a cleanse action on DD jobs. BRD has Paean, which is a cleanse action on a DD job. The problem with Erase was that it was specifically limited to DoTs. This made it useless in most fights. However, it is/was quite useful for things like covering people's mistakes in alliance raids (namely, mistakes that resulted in Bleed effects). Not only could it save a healer a GCD in such a case, but it is/was fast enough to prevent deaths.