Until that clown fiesta happened and you wasted all your oGCDs already and are forced using GCD heals, and an aoe targets you. Suddenly this turns into an issue. This while such aoegcd could have mitigated a lot of damage (especialy with bosses that show when they are about to do a strong global aoe). Saving some panic heals can do a lot.
Not every team is equaly fluent. And especialy in 4 player content, you do not have a backup healer.
Now you might say, if you had to resolve to that, its still the team that made the flaws, which is true. But your mistake could have still caused the wipe to happen. While your 10 cycles of not using a dps ability barely made any dent to begin with, and the wipe wasted a lot of time.
Sure, not all content requires you to use these (most doesnt). But there are those cases which arent standard. Also, those aoe healing over time abilities can provide a lot of health over time. And 1 gcd for such buffer can be very much worth it. And the less organized a team is, the more you are forced to rely on GCDs (and the higher the difficulty, the less usage they will see since those demand organized teams).
Keeping people on lower health will influence their decison making, since at safe health a lot more things can become viable as tactic. And those things can also result in a higher damage output. But most important: no matter how much GCDs you saved not using those abilities, the moment 1 dps dies, that dps loss will exceed every single dps you saved. Trying to keep them alive is nearly always more viable for dps output (the only case when it isnt, is when the dps was bad anyway).