FFXIV player here, what should I expect from wow forever ?

I did give retail a try once when I was taking a quick break from my other MMO, but didnt get too far in, with wow forever some of my ffxiv friends were gonna be getting back to wow while we wait for the next expac, and I had a few questions to ensure i'm at least somewhat competent when I start

* From my limited understanding, wow forever takes place in an alternate history of sorts, where certain events from the classic/retail timeline didn't happen, will I still be able to follow along even if I never got far into retail/have no knowledge of classic ? * I'm told that in wow, healers need to spend most of their time healing and rarely/ever hit their DPS buttons outside of solo content, how true is that statement ? * I'm also of the understanding that job balance in wow isn't as tight as compared to ffxiv where all jobs will generally performs within \~5% of each-other, if I end up picking a class that turns out to be not very good, how screwed would I be ? Is making another character and then bringing it to par something that wouldn't take too long to do ? * In FFXIV, cash shop items are all cosmetics, with the exception of level skips, in GW2 however, theres a lot of cash shop items that add QoL for the player, is wows cash shop more like the former or the latter ?

That's about all of my main questions, looking forward to seeing you all in Azeroth o7