Just bring back the trees. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the "illusion of choice" and there never has been.
Games are full of illusions. Gaming itself is full of illusions. If we use the mentality that any choice that has a "best" answer isn't a compelling choice then most RPGs are guilty of this. WoW is an RPG and the idea of building up your character through a combination of both passive and active effects is enjoyable.
I remember some specs being way more or less enjoyable because of their baked in effects that have no equivalent now. For example (and I might be wrong about the specifics, I'm going on memory) frost mages had a lot of talents that promoted crit damage to capitalize on their Shatter mechanic, and some classes like elemental shaman had naturally high baseline haste rating baked into their talents so you didn't have to rely on finding the extremely rare spell speed gear to get that enjoyable breakneck casting pace.
To be completely honest about my standing on talents, I don't actually like having these "real choices". In an effort to make them real, they've picked apart the classes in order to provide them shit that used to be baseline or in a talent that you'd be stupid not to take.
As a fun experiment, take every single talent in your tree and imagine how your class would play if you had every single effect from every active and passive on all of your rows. Of course some wouldn't work and some would be OP as hell but you get what I'm getting at here? I can say personally that a lot of my mains would almost resemble, say, MoP class design before they went and gutted the identity to slap it onto the talent row system.
I just don't really like the talent rows. As a demo lock for example, Azerite traits fundamentally changed the entire identity of my class whether I liked it or not. There were aspects to the class that were fun with the right but things like the haste bonus from Explosive Potential forced me into an awkward rotation that mandated very particular talents with little to no wiggle room.
I can't stand shit like that. I'm already making a choice to play a demo lock or a shadow priest or an arms warrior, I don't also want to play a totally different version of the same class that plays completely differently just because I got some traits that work with a very specific build.