ATC instructions specifying rate of climb and descent are largely redundant these days.
Are they ? Kindly tell you colleagues in Europe, there is hardly any flight on which we donīt get a "descent rate of 2000 or greater" or something like it. (and I have zero issue with that, just sayin..)
And the read back is bloody standard. I only ever usen "with the given" if we get several step descents in a row without level off and the controller had given us a rate before and does not specify a new rate - its a read back and a query in that case.