Think you might have a point.
… and actually, TBH, I predicted it would come to this some years ago. That as movement demands got toned ever upwards - as they must, as the game must continue to provide a challenge for those who have mastered the previous challenges over the years - this is pretty much inevitable. Doubly so for a game like WoW, where the business model expects continuous daily/weekly play, so there’s no “getting rusty” for the target audience now is there?
Thus eventually, the traditional cast bar must become too heavy an albatross around the paradigm’s neck; there just isn’t going to be room to accommodate such large numbers of 2-3 second forced stops.
Blizzard sometimes seems to get this, as when they started rolling out all those “cast while moving” abilities and even allowed Ele Shaman to cast Lightning Bolt while moving as a standard feature at one point, but then they backpedaled on it (another one of those decisions like removing Justice/Valor which seem very mysterious in retrospect) …
Even FFXIV is no bed of roses lately, Pandemonium this xpac has been excoriated by the caster and ranged community for catering so heavily to melee (through things like huge hit boxes - keeping in mind that XIV raid arenas are normally a lot smaller than WoW’s, so a boss with a huge hit box = “you can melee it from almost anywhere” - or dropping positional hit requirements which are a widespread class feature of XIV melee) that there feels like little point to casters (or even worse off, ranged physical, since Square Enix actually recognized that those classes should have a penalty to potential DPS to make up for both being ranged and having instant attacks, vs. Blizzard who basically always lets Hunters have their cake and eat it too).
This on top of the fact that their casters (especially Black Mages) often pretty much can’t shine until AFTER a fight is cleared and on farm, because it’s so essential to know the fight timeline down to the second in order to fit one’s casts around it (note that FFXIV’s apparently slower pace is an illusion: most of that time is there because the server needs stupid amounts of time to acknowledge state changes, so you usually don’t really have more time to react like it might look like to a player who isn’t familiar with both games).
At this rate it almost does feel like in the long run, we’re going to be pushed to the traditional fantasy of “sorcerers are only the bad guys” and heroic people (other than the healers, anyway) use physical weapons …
But as usual I’m not sure what the design solution really is, here. If you make the mechanics less frenetic, then maintaining a challenge curve over the years means that DPS has to be correspondingly more emphasized instead, and that in turn means justifying so many of the more negative player behaviors (particularly, the stereotypical needing more hardware than NATO to count on being able to join a PUG, and parse ranks being even more of a be-all and end-all metric, the latter of which is already the case in FFXIV where the aforementioned slow “server tick” system heavily limits complex fast-paced mechanic design).
Wait a second…