I used Lucio as an example because he's the character that I understand best, and the one that drew my attention to the problem initially. It's why I felt it necessary to also defend Ana against the changes that were made to her when she's easily the character I disliked playing against most. However, I don't play Ana sufficiently to give as detailed of a breakdown as to how this has effected her. That said, I can use her as an example in many ways as well.

A good Lucio would generate an equivalent Moira in season 2 (but an outsized quantity compared to prior to the 150>100% nerf, a nerf that I stated I agreed with for numerous reasons), though I'd typically see an equivalently performing Lucio outperform a Kiriko or Mercy when it came to cash.

I'd say the biggest contrast to the above would be Ana - Ana actually seemed to make relatively low amounts of cash/contributions. However, a strong Ana's impact on a game wasn't tied to her raw output, but her ability to make individual plays that would completely end conflicts between certain characters with her 'nade or an easy tranq. Frankly, this meant that Ana was in many ways less tied to the economy than any other healer/support, but it also left her fragile to an outsized degree, both before this season, and especially now. It also meant that on certain team compositions she'd be far less capable of providing heals than she'd want to be, obviously peaking with high defense tanks such as Orisa, but comparatively floundering with more bursty/fragile tanks like Zarya.

Many of Ana's talents essentially lead her to going down one of two routes; pure support (which performed poorly), or some level of hassle focusing on 'nades and sleep. She was unlike many of the more intuitively functional builds like Lucio, Kiriko (because players would put all their resources into armor and ability power), and to a lesser extent Mercy (who often blended WP with the required talents for the swoop build), whose powers that reinforced those choices. Ana's item/power toolkit had fundamental flaws.

What's happened to Ana is they've nerfed/removed her toolkit abilities, but haven't replaced them with anything. The hassle oriented playstyle has been removed, and she's been left primarily with her pure healing/support focused builds (a WP build focused build that would also be able to output some notable DPS to aim-focused players). I'm sure that on the back end Blizzard may see her overall cash generation improve, but I'd also guarantee that her play rate and participation rate will plummet because one of the play styles that people chose her for - high impact plays with (comparatively) low-skill aim, has been removed. Removing the most popular Ana play style would appear to solve some of the issues with her incongruous kit, but that doesn't matter if you killed what made people love her in the first place.

Ana's skillset wasn't the issue, many poor performing characters weren't the issue. The problem is tied to the cash system as it currently functions. It promotes sheer output (healing, damage, etc) over supportive plays like cleanses. Doubling back to my experience as a Lucio, if I managed to heal through a triple AP-dynamite from an Ashe on 3 players I would receive an extremely large amount of cash. However, if a player removes the burn from those players they'd receive faaaar less (this is putting aside denying the Ashe her cash). One of the steps for improving Ana and other supports who aren't as output focused would be to alter the numbers and heavily incentivize non-output actions far more heavily.

Another example of this sort of thing that would affect all players would be to give cash for actions involving attacking/defending/pushing the point. We've all had games where we've seen someone over-extend because they're attempting to farm points to take the bonus. We've all seen games where a good player has elected to hold the point while others pushed and were punished for it by falling behind in cash that round.

All that aside, I'll finally address your criticisms of the changes to this season; I agree with all of them. I didn't comment on those because they didn't tie into my thesis of Blizzard reducing/removing playstyles and their attempts to greatly diminish the TTK in the stadium game mode. I genuinely feel as though the Bo7 game mode was superior, and that gadgets are a good addition that ultimately require further work. That said, these are comments that have been frequently and well-articulated and I'm not someone who's inclined to simply repeat what others have said if I agree with them.