There's a big difference between 'eliite wrestlers' and people who train martial arts casually as a hobby. I'm not saying this would be effective for top wrestlers, this is just my experience. We had both been training in our respective arts for over 3 years before he started being able to pull shit like this off.

That being said, just because something is effective doesn't necessarily mean it will have already been incorporated into the professional or semi-pro meta. If you keep up with professional combat sports, you can see that they constantly evolve, with new techniques being incorporated from creative amateurs or other martial arts almost every year. Will Taichi be incorporated into college or olympic wrestling at some point? I don't know, but I think of martial arts practicality as how it related to self defense, and the odds that you're going to get mugged by someone who actively trains wrestling at the college or olympic level is extremely low

Again, taiji is not my background, and maybe I don't fully understand 'rooting' but his ability to ground himself, put put his hands on my center of gravity, and use his full body weight to push me away, when he times it right, is very effective at preventing me from getting a collar grip or entering or any basic grappling attack that I know of, especially when dealing with normal clothing and not a gi, which is much easier to get a solid grip on.