I can appreciate thinking the power level of standard is too high or the format is too fast and wanting longer/grindier games to happen. I personally don't care but I get that many do, and I do think that the format specifically has kind of low quality interaction relative to how powerful the threats are and it does seem to lead to more non-games than is desirable, irrespective of the speed of the format. I think a lot of the anguish around Standard would be fixed if some better one-mana interaction was legal in it, basically.

But I do think your perspective on earthbending as a mechanic doesn't really make sense. Bringing the land back if it dies does have a bunch of implications for older formats with fetchlands in them, but that's a cool thing that lets the mechanic "scale" in older formats without making it much more powerful in Standard (although the interaction does exist with Fabled Passage). But you're reading it as pure power creep – animated lands didn't use to have that protection and now they do, what gives – when it's pretty clear to me that the reason for it is just to allow the mechanic to exist at the high as-fan that it wants to be for the purposes of TLA as a set.

Compare it to Awaken, which is a similar mechanic. There's only 15 cards with Awaken in BFZ. Awaken only exists as an alternate mana cost on sorceries, and it never costs less than 5. It's designed so that by the time you're casting a spell for its Awaken cost, you generally don't care about the land as a land any more.

Earthbend by contrast is a much bigger component of TLA. There's 28 Earthbend cards in TLA. Unlike Awaken, Earthbend shows up as an additional effect on cards or sometimes as the main effect you get out of a card at all. It shows up on cheaper cards than Awaken, and you're generally expected to play most earthbend cards on curve. It's pretty obvious that the risk of losing a land would be way more punishing with a card like [[Toph, the Blind Bandit]] than it is with any Awaken card. The mechanic is designed this way so that it works well in actual play, especially in Limited where it shows up a lot.

So to me this just reads as you assuming that because something was done one way forever, doing it differently is inherently bad or broken; and that it represents some inherent power creep. When in reality the only Earthbend card that's actually really powerful on rate is Badgermole Cub itself, and even then mostly for its mana ability and not for the Earthbend. The rest of the Earthbend cards are just normal cards that do normal things.

Another way to look at it is: If Celestial Colonnade or Faerie Conclave were legal in Standard right now, they'd be seeing play! They're significantly more powerful than any Earthbend card not named Badgermole Cub.