The key phrase in this statement is “when unnecessary.” What you deem as “unnecessary” may not be what others deem to be “unnecessary.”
I understand that your argument here is that more choices are always better than fewer choices. But that statement (and in this case, that math), only exists in truth in a vacuum.
In a vacuum, there were 2 choices: having the elemental, and not having the elemental. The change to elemental removed a choice. Our net loss, in this case, is choice.
But we need to step out of the vacuum, because there’s so much more at play here. One of the big things we need to remember is development time. Every single talent, spell, ability, class, specialization, race, quest, npc, zone, instance, boss, mob, mount, toy, etc. requires a certain degree of work. Each of those things requires a different level of effort from those responsible for designing and maintaining those things.
Blizzard decided that the level of effort required to make the permanent elemental balanced, useful, and enjoyable was too high. They have clearly struggled to make it relevant for years, and I’d be willing to bet they preferred when players took the Lonely Winter talent. Even if you say “let me have the choice to keep it but let it be useless” it still poses issues because 1) it needs to be maintained in that state and 2) players will find a way to complain about it.
Given the choice of “We’ll keep Water Elemental around at the expense of not providing updates to other aspects of your class / spec” and “We’re effectively removing water elemental so that we can provide more healthy options to the rest of your class / spec”, is the choice still as “mathematically indisputable?”
The choice previously was “you can have a sugar cookie or a chocolate chip cookie.” The bakery decided that the sugar cookies weren’t popular enough and were diverting resources from the much more popular chocolate chip. So they removed the sugar cookie, but now the chocolate chip cookies are 25% bigger for the same price. Personally, I prefer sugar cookies. But I can’t deny the fact that getting more cookie is a much better deal.
