I always find it amusing that people find WAR useful until they disagree with what it says about a borderline Hall of Famer, then it's garbage. Yet nobody looks at the list of top 10 career WAR and says "that list is absurd".
When talking about catchers who's career were "cut short", how about Mauer? He was a very good catcher who had a 135 OPS+. He played until he was 35, but at less valuable position (1B) and had a 105 OPS+.
Mauer was worth 44.6 WAR in his first 10 seasons, before he was forced off catching. He was worth 10.6 WAR in his final 5 seasons (post concussions). It stands to reason he'd have had some aging related loss of performance those last 5 years even if he didn't have the concussion.