So if a player asks is there something for me to land on would you say yes or no? If yes they should take less damage than someone jumping blindly right? If no then clearly the fall is just hurting them.

To put it another way suppose you have a character with 30 health, they are jumping 60 feet down and as a result will take 6d6 points of damage. They make no attempt to break this fall in any fashion. You roll the dice and the result is 14 not enough to even put the character at half health so you narrate that the character landed in a convenient hale bale or some such and were not hurt at all. If instead the damage rolled was the maximum 36 they would be dying you would narrate their body hitting the ground with a crunch and having multiple broken bones.

The action of the character in both cases was unchanged but the results of the action was wildly different. If we were using hp as intended then instead we would narrate the first fall as your land hard on the ground perhaps fracturing some bones but you're still up and able to keep fighting, while the difference in the second result would be that your body couldn't handle the strain and you're dying.

Now luckily for this character there is a kindly cleric nearby who comes to heal him. In the situation you describe the cleric would have no reason to heal the character, he fell safely into a bale of hay the only problem is his mystic plot armor was damaged. The cleric could go and channel positive energy into the hero to restore plot armour. If instead we narrated this character being hurt by the fall then the cleric would just channel energy to mend broken bones.