Casualization in terms of difficulty? No.
Casualization in terms of time required to do something? Yes.
The thing that hurt the game the most was the loss of strong social experiences. Those experiences were fostered by the things that were (frankly) though of as bad design. You get infinitely more of the game now that we can queue for dungeons, use LFG/LFR/LFGuild tools, have resources like mmochampion, flying mounts, portals everywhere, easy leveling. The game, design wise, is way better for it. But they never really put in anything that forced the social experiences we had before so everything fell from there.
As an aside, Lol at /r/iamverysmart.