You are simultaneously right and wrong. Towards the end of WotLK damage was high, but you didn’t need to try and calculate how many modifiers were going to be behind the next thing that hits you on the fly. I personally quite enjoy having to think about my globals, what I don’t enjoy is pressing a button only to get kicked into every button on the keyboard > 1000% DPS spike and dying on lockout.
Traditionally Ele has always been a bit of an outlier, not because of individual spell damage but because of the overload roulette, but if a shattered Frost Bolt is coming your way in 3.3.5, you don’t have to worry about whether that particular cast is about to hit you for 5k or 50k.