The problem with phrases like 'the two-minute meta' is that it functions as a mental shortcut that prevents people from thinking or asking questions.

Burst has always been important in this game, and the design decisions around it have made certain jobs mandatory for entire expansions. Burst can't be balanced against sustain, because fights have downtime, which in turn allows cooldowns time to tick down. Having a short, strong burst works to your advantage, because you're punished less for downtime outside of it. If you want a good example of this, just think about WAR vs. DRK in Stormblood. DRK was perpetually at a disadvantage because it lacked the raw burst potential that WAR did.

Having variable recasts on burst windows doesn't work either, because not all recasts are created equal. NIN was a mandatory pick for most of this game's history because Trick Attack was a powerful debuff on a 60s recast, which meant that it synced up very well with everyone else.

So what has changed? There's no special advantage to bringing one job over the others, as far as burst is concerned. There's no concern about a 90s Brotherhood not syncing up well with a 120s Embolden. Harder fights are designed such that mechanics intersect with burst rather than during downtime. We're also starting to see newer jobs being designed around resource management rather than simple timers, which adds an extra layer to the execution and punishes deaths more harshly.

The people who push the idea of a 'two-minute meta' ruining their fun are actually the players who played jobs that benefitted the most from the old system. What we have now is a level playing field, and we see much more raid composition variety as a result.

One last thing - this one point about damage variance keeps coming up, and it's a reflection of the fact that some players are only concerned with their 'high score' and not their average performance. This is not a new complaint, nor is it linked to the changes around raid buffs (especially since the individual benefit of raid buffs has dropped off - Trick Attack used to be 10% every 60s compared to Mug's 5% every 120s!) WAR mains were complaining about damage variance even back in Stormblood, which is why Inner Release was changed to guarantee Crit/DH. This is not a real problem. It's a reflection of this community's obsession with having one perfect run even if they play inconsistently the rest of the time.