Healers, then and now:

[Renathras]

I'll start with WHM, since that's what I've always played and what I know.

Going from SB to ShB, WHM's DPS kit had the following setups and changes:

In Stormblood:

Stone IV - Standard nuke. Upgrade path from Stone, Stone II, and Stone III.
Aero II - Instant cast DoT, 18 sec duration. Upgrade path from Aero. [3.33... casts per minute on average.]
Aero III - Cast time AOE DoT, 24 sec duration. Separate from Aero II, still a single target gain over Stone IV. [2.5 casts per minute on average.]
Holy - AOE Spam, same as today.
(oGCD) Assize - Use on 60 sec CD for damage, slight delays for healing if it didn't cost a use over the encounter.
(oGCD) Presence of Mind - 150 sec CD to increase healing. lol, funny. Damage. To increase damage.
(oGCD) Cleric Stance - 90 sec CD to increase damage, Role Action (when you could only choose 5) that was sometimes not taken if fights required the other things instead (which were Protect, Divine Seal, Lucid Dreaming, Surecast, Swiftcast, Esuna, Rescue, Eye for an Eye, and Break; meaning this Cleric Stance wasn't even always a given.)

In Shadowbringers (and moreso in Endwalker with damage neutral Misery):

Glare/Glare III - Standard nuke. Upgrade path from Stone, Stone II, and Stone III, Stone IV.
Dia - Instant cast DoT, 30 sec duration. Upgrade path from Aero, Aero II. [2 casts per minute on average.]
Afflatus Misery - Once per 1.5 min (ShB)/1 min (EW) use ability after using 3 of Afflatus Solace/Rapture. [1 cast per minute on average (EW; 0.66... in ShB)]
Holy/Holy III - AOE Spam.
(oGCD) Assize - Use on 40 (EW post 6.3) sec CD for damage, slight delays for healing if it doesn't cost a use over the encounter.
(oGCD) Presence of Mind - 120 sec CD (30 less/more often than SB) to increase healing. lol, funny. Damage. To increase damage.
Afflatus Solace/Rapture - Instant cast, 20 sec (30 in ShB) CD. Heals used 3 times per minute to generate a Misery, which is a damage gain over Glare when placed in buff windows and is useful even ignoring that for an increase in MP economy (since it saves you 1,600 MP per minute by not having to cast 4 Glares to do the same damage.) [3 casts per minute on average.]

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In practice, SB WHM cast Aero 2 3.333... times per minute and Aero 3 2.5 times per minute. This is a total of 5.833... GCD casts per minute that weren't Stone IV.

In practice, EW WHM casts Dia 2 times per minute, 3 Afflatus (Solace/Rapture) per minute, and 1 Afflatus Misery per minute. This is a total of 6 GCD casts per minute that aren't Glare III.

On balance, EW WHM is casting non-Glare damage (or damage-adjacent Solace/Rapture) spells on roughly the same average frequency as SB era WHM did.

The real difference, honestly, is on the HEALING side, where a proliferation of oGCD heals (even on WHM) and the healing done by Afflatus heals can largely push non-Afflatus GCD heals off of average use, resulting in more Glare casts. Afflatus spells are, of course, being cast, but as noted, these can be thought of as part of the DPS rotation equivalent to the lost Aero 2 and 3 casts, so the foregone casts are Medica, Medica 2, Cure 2, Cure 3, and Regens, resulting in more "dead" GCDs that are filled with Glare.

ONE additional note is that Stone/Glare took up the GCD, so weaving was far less of a thing in SB, and only became a thing for WHM in ShB due to Solace/Rapture/Misery allowing for it at need. SB Aero 2 refreshes were on the 18 sec cycle, so if you needed to heal 6 seconds after applying Aero 2, you had no option but to clip if you were doing so with an oGCD; note that using Swiftcast to create a window...would also be clipping since you'd be clipping to use Swiftcast itself. Solace/Rapture gave WHM 2 additional weave windows per minute, and unlike a DoT, using these is a lot more flexible. In EW, this was increased to 3 per minute, with the 4th, Misery, lining up with buff windows every 2 minutes, for a total of 3.5 averaged additional weave windows not locked to a hard timer like DoT natural refreshes...and, of course, EW Glare/Glare III just outright allow a weave.

But in a strict sense, the DPS rotation of WHM in EW is just as complex (arguably SLIGHTLY more complex) than that of SB WHM, meaning WHM in EW isn't any simpler in a DPS sense. If anything, it's that HEALING has been made simpler, leading to DPS being more bland since there are more "dead" GCDs that have to be filled with the standard nuke. (One might note here that the first line solution would be to restore the SB healing model rather than changing WHM's DPS model, since the DPS model is pretty close to identical, and the Lily based healing model of SB...sucked noodles, so the modern system is an outright upgrade in use and functionality.)

But in terms of DPS abilities, EW and SB WHM had the same number, and roughly the same use per minute of non-nuke (Stone IV/Glare/Glare III) spells.

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I'll look at the others later (or some of you may do so), and suspect that we'll get a pretty different picture in the case of SCH (obviously), though with AST...it'll look a lot like WHM given that they've only ever had Combust, Malefic, and Gravity spell lines, augmented by Lord of Crowns, though at the time it was limited to once per 30 seconds (Draw's CD) if and only if you were willing to burn the Card you had at the time. AST's differed complexity was in having two stances, its Card systems, and its generally more complex healing kit (vs WHM's)

In the case of WHM, objectively speaking, the current kit is roughly comparable to SB's in terms of non-spamnuke use on average. The only real distinction is you don't have the fire and forget Cleric (which you didn't always have at the time anyway), that it's a bit smoother in terms of DoTs, and that you have far more weave spaces and less non-Afflatus GCD heals that are needed, leading to more Glares.

That is, you don't cast more Glares because you have less DPS abilities in WHM's kit (treating Solace/Rapture as DPS since they contribute to Misery and are both a DPS gain and MP management system), it's that you cast fewer GCD heals that don't start with Afflatus, and those ones are more part of your DPS rotation (though variable in placement) than strictly heals at this point. (You use them for healing and move them for healing, but you also ensure you use them, even if overhealing, to keep that Misery rolling.)

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Anyway, we TALK about this a lot, so I think it IS instructive to actually break it down and see if it's factual talk or rose tinted goggles talk.

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Oh, one MORE thing:

I'll see if I can find HW notes as well, but the main change for WHM there is we still had Stone 1 and Stone 2 (though you didn't use Stone 1), and we had Aero 2 as a separate DoT with a cast time instead of Aero 3. Outside of that, we had Cleric Stace as a toggle rather than CD (though, as always, I contend that's the most rose tinted goggle ability in MMO history). But in practice, the DPS kit ITSELF was equivalent. There might be slight variations depending on what those DoT durations were (e.g. if they were 18 and 24, no difference, but if they were 15 and 18, that would average out to slightly more casts, probably ~6.5 per minute, vs SB's 5.8 and EW's 6.0), but this will still be pretty close to equivalent.

So there will still be PRETTY close parity even there for WHM.

Note this is SPECIFICALLY for WHM - SCH had more in SB and I THINK even more in HW (will have to look at Cross-Class abilities on top of their own native ones), though I honestly have no idea what AST was doing at the time...so that's going to be a fun history lesson for me as well.