Ok well, thats just like, your opinion man.
You can give food a use beyond being useless clutter by having your characters consume food when long resting. Not necessarily a requirement to long rest.. but if you go a few long rests without food you'll start to suffer exhaustion, as per 5e rules, I think that would be great.
A huge amount of the combat damage is due to the ground effects which nobody likes. IF they removed them that would be all the toning down combat would need in my opinion.
The "handwaving" is magic. Potions are inherently magical, so yes they can do things that we don't normally expect since they don't exist i nthe real world.. we don't have any real world reference to judge them by. Food is something that we have in the real world and we know what it does in the real world.
