Nobody thinks Trout is not great at baseball.
WAR has explicit era factors, the biggest to punish the 19th century pitchers because without it, it turns out a pitcher who throws 500 innings and leads the league in ERA produces more value to their team than a pitcher that grows 220 innings and leads the league in ERA, which is not what people wanted to see. It also has a minor component that upscales modern players for playing against what it assumes to be tougher competition, which may or may not be fair but is also an explicit favoring of players of modernity.
The calculation is based on numerous statistics with weighted values, every one of which is arbitrary and values the things valued today, not the things valued long ago. There is also the softer component, that players like Trout shape their game around these metrics, whereas Mantle and Speaker could not possibly.
Guys with a high WAR tend to be great players. To conclude that Trout is half a season away from producing more career value than Griffey and has already surpassed DiMaggio means we must take almost all of WAR’s many underlying value assumptions to be true. One can argue reasonably that they are all correct, one may argue reasonably that they are not. That a player in 2022 has a marked advantage over a player from 1922 or even 1992 seems obvious.
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