Unfortunately, I fear they're not looking at how their changes reverberate through the system. The worst offender is handing out advantage like candy, with no resource cost. A host of abilities and spells offer the player or their team-mates advantage at some resource cost. The HP bloat and ready made surfaces, some produced by cantrips no less, trivializes anything that does damage. They are trivializing the benefits one gets from leveling up. In the end, their removing emphasis of a team of adventures, all with weaknesses and strengths, using their hard earned abilities to overcome challenges. And what do we get return? ""Oh, wow I can set your area effect on fire!" You know the one you wasted a spell slot on. Which is just as well, since if the area/spell actually landed, why would it matter that your team-mates would have advantage to hit due to blinding, enwebbing, entangling, or knocking prone their foe. All your team-mate needs to due is walk behind the target to get advantage. Not even flanking is in the core rules, guess what, this is is why.
HP bloat is mainly for goblins and they've reduced AC, the most likely cause of this change is to scale goblins somewhat along with giving them consumables to make the fight challenging and somewhat easy to tune (can always reduce the hp, reduce consumable usage) while not drastically increasing round time by adding goblins.
The minos in the Underdark do not have HP bloat for example, so it's mainly the goblins.
Also, you can keep talking about cantrips and surfaces as though they're superior to everything in the arsenal except the math doesn't quite work out that way; hex + scorching ray, MM with or without the necklace at level 2, full round of attacks from either a ranger or a thief etc.
And these things tend to come with levels, so I have no idea why you're being such a bitch about it. Your argument would be stronger if you stated it diminishes the gap between levels and then you would need to prove it by stating how much.
The weaknesses and strengths are very much apparent even in the current flawed system; clerics are superior at utility, rogues at maneuvering and at burst damage, fighters for general damage / shoving lol and some cc (battlemaster), wizards for area and guaranteed damage, and warlocks for ranged damage and minimal utility, and rangers for solid damage and horde control / single target specialization.
So yeah, you can get advantage pretty easily but so can your opponents, it still comes down to better positioning and when all things are even usage of resources.
