It teaches you more than what WoW teaches you when it comes to how a good majority of fights will work. That is already leagues above what WoW does in terms of extrapolating mechanics.
How a class operates and how to play it optimally in FF14 is something I’ll agree with you on - you do need to go and consult external sources to understand it. Most MMOs, especially WoW, has this as a quality. Conditioning a player to be good at a class is something I haven’t seen too many MMOs do successfully.
I’ll stop being so critical of the developers in this department once these mechanical indicators remain consistent across multiple iterations. I still remember when the swirls were used on KJ as the thing to stand on rather off. Even as early as Aberrus, you can see different ground indicators reused with completely different meaning (Amalg in particular comes to mind IIRC).
Consistency would go a VERY long way.