I don't find it annoying personally but I find it's not necessary. More than the circle countdown, the numeric timer on the skill icons themselves is a massive improvement. The skills already used to turn grey when on cooldown and the image would cycle back around until usable again. I don't know why they didn't just keep that and make the number for the timer bigger.

I thought the issue in the first place was that anything apart from a numeric value was not accurate enough to be useful. Why did they make the number so small? That's the most odd thing to me.