Not looking at the game or even the class holistically is how we got the half-caster warlock. Tasha's 1.01 beats out homogenised soup where class distinctiveness is seen as a bad thing and everyone uses the same three cookie-cutter spell lists and same two cookie cutter casting types (and let's not forget they tried to abolish spells known entirely for even more cookie cutter classes).
Rather than homogenization, we're getting inertia. If there is even a squeak of disdain, they will scurry back to 2014 and claim that's what we want. And maybe it is. After all, inertia was what made fighters be stuck as the "I attack" class in D&D Next after all.
The two aren't necessarily opposed ends of the scale. The changes and status quo can both be bad. The stagnation concern seems to more fundamentally stem from the "this isn't a new edition" selling point.
I'll take inertia and keeping what works while improving a little over actively making things worse. And there are improvements in this that are significantly beyond those in Tasha's (which was mostly genuine improvements).
no look at the two clearest examples we have (wildshape templates & spell lists by power source). The wildshape templates had a statblock that was so bad it would not be a stretch to say it had level 1-8 druid pegged to the paladin's starting gear with a shrug over the fact that the statblock had a cap while the paladin can expect to keep getting better gear. The unified spell lists were assembled mostly by copying the list from a class where having an expanded spell list was a huge chunk of the primary class identity(cleric/wizard/druid) then shared as is with classes that have a bunch of class features to compensate for a smaller spell list that just got massively expanded.
