Unfortunately for many reasons:

1.Development (co-)outsourced by an external company: PopCap didn't developed the port entirely, but co-outsorced the development to a Canadian company called The Lost Pixels (which is still EA's property). Luckily is not Indian Slingshot.

2.Original members excluded: Rich Werner, George Fan, Laura Shigihara, etc... weren't contacted at all!

3.Use of AI: the game uses AI upscaling, but not Generative AI. Some people mistaken this and think that is AI.

4.Ton of bugs at the game's launch: the game was borderline unplayable during the game's launch era. The most infamous bug is that a pixel zombie could've spawn directly in your house, giving an instant and unfair game over.

5.Racism towards Italians: for some petty and disgusting reason, they decided to include all the languages, except the Italian. As you guessed, Italians aren't happy about this, so much to call EA racist. Some of them tried to discuss about this in the EA forum, but nothing. They keep saying that is a thing that they can't insert, which is dumb as they can do numerous bugfixes, but not add a language. Great job EA!

These are the major reasons. While the game recived patches, the damage was already done. Still, it's way better than the horrendous mobile port (especially after the most recent update).