In shadowlands healers did much higher damage and I can’t remember a single time the healer got called out for low damage in a key despite seeing many healers that did very low damage. You could increase healer damage significantly and this wouldn’t happen. The biggest difference as far as the social aspect was that healers that did do a lot of damage were much more likely to get complimented for it. Right now I almost never see healers get complimented for their damage even when they do a lot of it.
This is easier said than done. Even with the much higher healer damage in shadowlands it was never viewed as “essential” except for high keys…but every little bit of damage helps and even with the pitiful damage we do now I strongly believe it has a bigger impact than people think and details suggests. If you’re in floodgate and doing the bloodwarper pull and the healer does ~1M dps to it…it’s going to look like nothing on details because there’s a lot of mobs there and the dps are doing huge amounts of aoe, but the healer can be contributing quite a lot to its death and that is the only mob that is going to kill people. 1 fewer bloodwarp casts is a massive difference for survivability and CD’s…especially with the common pug route where those AOE demons right before swamp boss are fought immediately afterwards.