I don’t think it’s a good sign if a very promising espoir is supposed to be one of the central signings of the season (an occasional freak aside). But I do think it’s a good sign for a team to be signing them.
That's the point I'm making. In no way do I suggest that Healy is a bad transfer for EF. But if he and Chaves are going to be EF highlight signings this year, it's not a good situation considering the fact they're set to lose Higuita and Rutsch and they're in a point they could use some strengthtening of their roster instead of merely trying to level out the gains and the losses.
It's worth noticing how they already had a modest budget in 2020, yet they had a roster that could fit so much more quality riders. Since then they've lost Martinez, Woods, Vanmarcke, Clarke, Halvorsen and now Higuita, while the only riders on presumably biggish contract signed since then were Valgren and Chaves. Also Van Garderen retired and it's to be expected his contract was pretty big (it's signed when he still performed in one-week races and he was a relatively big name) and Uran has likely taken a pay-cut too because he had signed the previous contract straight after taking 2017 TdF podium and it ran out after 2020. Atop of that, EF has got financially compensated for releasing Martinez out of the contract early and maybe too the same story with Woods. So you would assume that should their budget be around the same relative to everyone else as it was in 2020 (and it already was definetely one of the lowest in the WT in 2020), then they should have room for some biggish signings. If they don't, it means their budget is not really fit for WT requirements, unfortunately.