Does MySQL have information_schema.VIEW_COLUMN_USAGE or an equivalent?
Sorry - the answer is: no.
Indeed what you found is the only thing in I_S regarding views.

Not only is this barbaric on the client side, it is also such on the server side: when you:

SELECT ... FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME='your_view'


MySQL actually drills down to referenced table definitions and this type of query is very costly if there are many nested views (I have a particular case on my servers).