I'm baffled what the point of this whole "Regen/Shield" thing was when so far they've done almost nothing to further differentiate between the two. All it will serve is ingraining bad mindsets in the playerbase by adding a likely unnecessary divide in PF with the added categories, sort of like the "must play Noct with a WHM" myth inexperienced players latched onto, except now the Devs have officially stated it to make it even worse.

Sage, like SCH is a Pure Healer with a few shields/mitigation in the toolkit.

They didn't build on shields or do any reworks or try to make it a proactive playstyle. Just slapped a misleading label on that can be applied in Party Finder and called it a day.