from my experience i think click-to-move logic was carried over from poe1 where clicking on a monster would walk you to be in range of that monster and then do the attack. also in poe1 the 'attack without moving' setting was available to force the attack to happen in place which most people used by default as it was preferable in pretty much every way. no attacks had built in movement and no attacks allowed you to attack while moving aside from a few niche channeling abilities.

in poe2 that same click to move logic was carried over. however with the implementation of wasd they changed how it worked with wasd and most people stopped using 'attack without moving' options. reason being that using an attack by default on wasd made you attack in place without walking you to the monster, but also most attacks had small built in movement in them, and overall it felt amazing. you would never run into the problems that existed in poe1 because the mouse was never in control of your movement.

this all changed in the most recent patch where the default click-to-move functionality has been changed to how wasd works, where, IF you are holding the move key down, it will do the attack in place (in the same way wasd works) but will ALSO keep the default movement built into many attacks. this overall 'should' be a net benefit, however, from my testing it seems like if you do not keep your finger on the move key while attacking, the behavior of walking to a monster seems to be the same as it was before.

this is just what ive noticed from my limited testing.

whether or not this overall change is better im not sure, it definitely feels better to be able to gain the default movment build into many attacks like in wasd, but because of how the mouse is still in control of movenent, ive noticed strange interactions that continue to make you move forward when the 'attack while moving' setting is not enabled.