I specified that I drew on my experience playing WoW, not that what I was saying started with WoW or Blizzard. In the third paragraph I make clear that many games use these archetypes. I even mention that the priest is often called the cleric. These archetypes existed as early as Dungeons and Dragons, possibly before then.
The morphing into digital athletics as you mention is an inevitability of RPGs. Even D&D has min-maxers, those people will always exist. Keep in mind that it is short-sighted to think of them as “not playing the game properly.” What you may view as the “right” way to play an RPG, may not be the same for others. Indeed some see digital athletics to be the pinnacle of a given game. That is fun, at least to these people. Let’s keep in mind that everyone has fun in different ways, and one of the majesties of RPGs is that you can often play them in the way you find most fun.

You say that digital athletics made content easier than intended, but I’m not sure that is true. When an RPG dev makes an encounter to be of a certain difficulty, that difficulty is specially crated knowing full well that players could surpass the creators in performance of the game. You can’t make an RPG and not assume digital athletics will lead to players being better at it than you. The only conclusion is to react to the players, to develop in a way that adjusts to these athletics, while also keeping it fun for as many players as possible.

Increasing the difficulty is a natural reaction to digital athletics, and that’s fine because it’s only those athletes that will have fun with that content. If you enjoy the game in a non-athletic format, the upper echelon of difficulty is irrelevant to you. The Olympics were made because there were athletes, not the other way around.