Most MMOs move away from auoattack nowadays. Barely any games aside from MMOs even have autoattack anyway. So i do think it is moving backward to implement something like autoattack. It's the kind of decision that comes about from a false appraisal of what is a "standard" in MMOs.

Autoattack wasnt a standard, it was a limitation holding the genre back.

Personally, I dont see what people see in the feature, myself.