Ruin Explorer
Legend
It can also be seen as cultural erasure of any reference to shamans in the core books and whitewashing all non-European shamans to become pseudo-European Celts instead of using some mechanical elements of D&D druids to support shamanic concepts being used in D&D games.
Have "shamanic concepts" which are connected to real-world cultures ever been used in D&D?
For it to be "cultural erasure", that would necessarily have to have been the case.
If I look at various "Shaman" classes through the editions, there's very little consistency. Typically "spirits" are involved, but the actual class/kit/prc etc. can range from anything from basically a berserker to an extremely high-fantasy character who is constantly summoning actual solid spirit-beings which smash people's faces in, to basically just a synonym for another divine or even arcane caster, and their cultural trappings, in my experience, have typically been skin-deep at most.
It's a bit like the Shaman class in World of Warcraft, where it's got some vague trappings which kinda sorta slightly maybe tie it to Native American ideas (sorta kinda) but it's basically just "elemental magic dude", with the most "Shaman" thing it does being putting down "totems" (let's not even get into that).
It's not Druids in D&D past 2E are even vaguely related to even nonsensical New Age takes on what a Druid is, either. They're just Nature Magic Class with bonus Shapeshifting. That shapeshifting itself is un-Druidic is we look at Celtic and other ideas of Druids. There's a lot of shapeshifting in Celtic myth (hell, in virtually all myth, world-wide), but it's not Druids doing it, by and large. If anything Shamans should be the shapeshifters - a lot of cultures who the West has called the holy people/wise people of "Shamans" have strong traditions of shapeshifting associated with those people.
So I kind of question this premise here. If D&D had consistently used real-world stuff in Shamans, or had a consistent idea of what "Shamans" could do, and if 5E Druids didn't actually match what Shamans can do in a lot of myth BETTER than what Druids can do, I think you'd have a better point. Maybe we should just rename Druid to Shaman and call it a day.