Honestly, the game was doomed for sure after the terrible overhaul that added the combat stamina system. It was ruined the arcade, beat'em up vibe, and just added ANOTHER element that needed to be dealt with while developing content.
Yeah, the combat overhaul really turned the simple but enjoyable combat into something weird.
Beyond the fact that now the fighting demands that you manage your stamina more carefully, because the attacks started using a lot more of it, thus trying to force you into a playstyle of "get in and do a few quick attacks-get back and restore your stamina with a taunting animation-resume attacking again" which killed the flow, the attack animations themselves became really weird. Like, I was playing as Sam, because I dared to be more interested in scenes with a girl, instead of a furry (not against furry content, but preferences be preferences), and in the newer versions, Sam's 1st quick attack in a combo moves you back slightly, while the 2nd one moves you forward slightly, which leads to your average fight using Sam looking like she's having a seizure and it
feels weird to play as her now. Her air attack also feels weird, because the animation shows that she's doing a diagonal air kick, which in most games allows you to both attack in mid-air and retain your speed, but for some reason she
loses all momentum during the mid-air attack, which both looks and feels weird (also, she only does the kick when you attack while going down, if you attack while ascending during the jump, you do your ground attack animations in mid-air which is wack).
Plus, as I've mentioned before, the new playstyle kinda wants you to play less aggresively, yet the enemies are not changed to accomodate the new playstyle, as all of them feature an extremely simple behaviour of "approach the player and do an attack animation with not much in-between frames", and as such, while
you need to stay back and be careful, the enemies just act like unstopping zombies, and then some enemies also turn invincible for a surprisingly long amount of time after you deal some damage to them and the game still doesn't warn you when they'll do it, which leads to you just suddenly getting punished for,
playing the game, I guess.
Also also, as a sidenote, I've noticed that the newer versions outright lag more. My PC is not really powerful, but as an example, in the new version, the game has a severe lag when the Jiang-shi enemy (the hopping skunk? enemy with a strip of paper on it's face in the cemetery stage) summons the grabby hands from the ground, and that never happened to me in the older versions.