What the heck did they do to the class. All the fun stuff that made this class unique seems to have been guttered into a 4 button cookie cutter machine.
This is the first time I have played priest in 20 something years and just been really bored by the concept of how it works. I used to love all the utility like life swap, spell reflect, mana burn, renew, Even iconic spells like Mindgames seems to be guttered. Racial specials gone. Utility gone.
Is priest just the easy / safe filler class now?
I mean, you’re very late to the party. Not only did they remove a lot of the original utility but for this expansion they also removed about half of our healing spells. It seems that most, if not all, classes got this same treatment. I think just a few rotational buttons along with a few cooldowns is all most classes really have now.
It is what it is. Classic might be closer to what you remember.
Mindgames was a good concept, I didn’t realize Shadowlands was 20 years ago as per your post saying that you haven’t played a priest in 20 years haha, as for what have they done to the class, they seem to only care to balance around discipline specialization and ignore holy priest existence almost completely. Personally I’m not really impressed with so few changes to my favorite specialization going into season 2 after being one of the worst healers, by design, for season 1, I am unsure if I will continue to pay for this game, the company doesn’t care if they lose holy priest subscribers they make millions of dollars regardless.
Thats a shame I always liked that wow gave us options to play our way. You had a deep tool kit and could chose how you wanted to setup 
They used to. These are all past tense. Priests have nothing to pick from no matter what content or spec you are there is a very specific way to build and play and we have the weakest kit for utility, survivability, and mobility (unquestionably).
Our surviveability is okay. Even with no huge defensive I am always near or at the top of my raid for % mitigated damage (after the tanks).
This just means your raid is bad at using DRs… this has been assessed and is tracked in logs. We’re bottom 3 with evoker and mage. Rogue is just above us.
But were tiered at the bottom because or mitigation/survival requires casting a flash heal, Desperate prayer, fade and shield to maximize our survival when not relying on dispersion. Its a loss of 3 GCD which is the worst “activation” requirement of any class and it “mitigates” 19% which is worse than mage and evoker single button for more. Both of them have multiple options that outnumber shadow priest as well. Evoker even has a group wide one and scales has 2 charges for 30%.
Dispersion is also very weak for the fact that it stops our ability to do damage. But in casual play a lot of people ignore DRs so the ones who use them seem to have better DRs. But 100% we have the worst and people far better than either of us have put hours upon hours of effort into documenting it.