Welcome to Healer Forums, Zen. No, you're not alone. Many of your sentiments coming back to the job has been expressed here since details about Shadowbringers were revealed. When 5.0 came along we found the job had been bludgeoned to forget half it's spells and the word "BALANCED" carved into it's forehead.

There isn't much fairy to manage anymore unfortunately, she's immortal and can't be commanded directly expect positions. If you find she's way out of range, can recommend making sure she is on "Heel" keeping your head on a swivel to make sure she's right behind you before using any commands or manually place her in arenas where she'll hit everyone with the spells. I don't know how much you played of earlier iterations, but I feel it currently flows like a river of bricks after losing control over it's petGCD. You either wait for someone to take damage or fill the empty pauses between with Ruin/Broil, occasionally refreshing Bio.

If you're having trouble setting up your hotbars I recommend finding a training dummy, hit it to start combat so you can use Aetherflow and stand in front of it as you put out every skills you have on the hotbar, read the text of each one and use it plenty of times so you can reach a skill without looking at your hotbar. Then take it to plenty of parties and dungeons to get a feel for what skills you use the most and reposition them for easier access to them.

If you're thinking it's less desirable in parties or by the devs themselves. If it helps, it's still perfectly capable of healing anything I've come across so far, even so well I find myself using Broil/Art of War more than my healing skills. For the latter, it's a toss-up at this point, they haven't been keen to deign a response yet.