It reminds me of the "new wave" of Magic design.
(Disclaimer: I haven't played M:tG in a long time. Consider my last experience to be Innistrad, for people who do.)
There was an article by Mark Rosewater (lead designer), which roughly boiled down to, "reward the player for what they would have normally done." This means that you reward playing cards, using all your mana, amassing an army, etc. In previous MtG sets, there were mechanics where creatures got bigger if you kept your hand above 7 cards (which you have to be trying to do, and reduces board presence), or if you had all your lands tapped (which puts you at a deliberate disadvantage because you won't have mana on your opponent's turn to react.) Those sets were pretty bad. The newer sets generally have mechanics that don't force you to take a downside. Good players will recognize when taking the downside is worth it, but it feels much better when you can just yolo-play everything.
Blizzard's nerfing strategy reminds me of this. People like playing creatures, people like actually getting to use their creatures, and according to this philosophy cards that allow someone to almost entirely ignore creatures need to be balanced carefully and should be good, but not overpowering.
This isn't an attack on that philosophy; I actually agree with much of it, and for a Dominion analogy I'm a lot gladder that buying actions is good a lot of the time in Dominion. However, I don't like how Blizzard goes for more heavy-handed nerfs against strategies that are less fun against new players. I'd prefer more frequent small nerfs, it tends to be harder to justify buffing a card until long after it has dropped out of the metagame.