You've been around a pretty good long time though
@Saelorn. You don't remember the whole story arc in, IIRC Snarfquest, which was literally titled "Don't Leave Town Without a Cleric", I think it was jokingly called "rule #1". No AD&D era party adventuring without a cleric would be likely to fare well. TECHNICALLY, yes, you could do it, PRACTICALLY, it was impossible. MAYBE if you had a party with like 2 druids in it (and only after 3rd level) and a paladin, you could eek by, until you found an NPC cleric to hire.
Anyway, in 4e, since I am more in tune with that, 'healers' are called 'leaders' and since the warlord, shaman, etc. all fall into that category there isn't a need for a true classic 'healbot cleric'. Leaders in that game are HIGHLY valued team members and force multipliers, and one of their core attributes is an ability to tactically translate healing surges into hit points. Some of these classes, like Cleric, also have some other fairly potent 'recovery' abilities. There are also some mechanisms, like certain rituals, which are usually healer territory, which allow for some limited HS transference, which is a pretty potent ability.
Now, at least by pure RAW, 4e treats healing largely similarly to 5e in terms of recovery, and 5e also has some potent non-cleric healers (I believe Bards are highly regarded in this respect, though I haven't played with one).
So, we must say that certain types of narrative have been improved by the new healing, and some have marginally been deprecated, but the overall result is a more 'heroic' default type of game. It sure seems like bending things back a bit in the other direction isn't all that hard. I would consider the sort of solution which was generally converged on in the 4e-era, which is to simply let the GM determine the exact value of a long rest based on the needs of the story and explained narratively in terms of unusual conditions, perhaps even a complete unavailability of any conditions suitable to resting at all in some cases. Time clocks, some mild tweaking of the core resting rules, etc. can provide further situational and general tuning where it makes sense.
In terms of all this narrative must make sense in only a certain specific narrow way or else the game is poop, come on. I challenge you to widen your horizons a bit. Nobody has to defend their tastes, but there's a segment of the D&D community which sure can get overly defensive and seems to harbor a, sometimes unvoiced, idea that only some sort of ideal of D&D as it was in 1974 is really 'right' and everyone else is full of it. I was there in 1974, really there, and this ideal never existed. People were always working around hit points (and other things) to try to achieve a game which was both practical to play, fun, and reproduced their favorite heroic fantasy tropes. That was never agreed as a consensus of exactly what they were after or how to get it, but it was always a lot wider than 'hit points MUST be meat!' and nobody ever really believed they were, except maybe the first 3 times they played. I know for a fact Gygax didn't believe that, nor did he run a game as if it was true. It won't hurt anyone, on either side of the debate, to just relax and be perfectly fine with varied interpretations. Luckily I think both of the last 2 editions of D&D have been fairly good in terms of supporting some version of either one.