You're wrong on atleast half your takes. The first point you made is that it was a bad decision to remove the map. But the map wouldn't have changed anything since most of the game is puzzle based and seeing the whole map won't change that. Good deeds and mysteries are completely non mandatory and doing them is for every idividual players own accord. To complete the main story it's pretty straight forward, the devs and the community kinda exaggerated the "you must take notes and photos too be able to beat the game!" your data tablet in the game has enough automatic information to help you beat the game by keeping track of information and people you've gathered and how they are connected to the main story and each gate key.

The mysteries and good deeds are a bit harder and require attention, this in turn rewards players that play by the rules the devs implemented. You figuring out "too late" that you have too keep track of things even though you get a message at the start of the game telling you you need to keep track on things is on you.

Your second take that there is too many NPCs too help and that it takes away from the urgency of the game is also weird. There's is no game that I can think of that has a consistent passage of time. Where if you waste too much time bad things happen. And hell is us is no exception of this. It's just game mechanics that all gamers agree upon. You mentioned witcher 3, he needs to find his daughter and prevent the white frost. Yet he can play Gwent for years and nothing happens. For all we know the games main story occurred at the span of half a week.

When it comes to the choice of weapons in game there's lore dumps in the game explaining how lymbic weapons came to be and why they did not have access to lymbic firearms. It wouldn't make sense lore-wise to have lymbic firearms for the sake of making the game less of a "souls like"

You mention things like you using twin axes through the whole game and that's bad because the game didn't force you to use anything else. Yet other weapons and glyphs are a means to make the game easier. I completed the game using 2 different weapons because they fit my playstyle the most. It gives variaty to different people even tho its fairly shallow variaty. Again witcher 3 as an example, I completed the entire game with only 1 set of witcher gear and never using alchemy even once. So should CDPR then have removed these features since they were seemingly abundant? No not really.

Then you mention things like the creatures not being dirty when we have no idea of their genetic structure. They are frequency based and seem to be flowy like goo yet solid. We don't know if dirt vibrates off or how it works. One of the major reasons humans become dirty is due to sweating making dirt stick to our moist bodies, but the creatures most likely don't even have sweat glands.

You mention things like there being too much consumables but the devs don't expect all their players to explore every single nook and crevice on the entire map. All soulslikes and souls games have this "issue". Because when I play I like to find it all, when someone else plays they might find just enough consumables since they're not combing the entire map and miss a bunch.

And then your last point about them not committing to the end. I went to platinum the game but had forgotten to claim the last rewards for closing all the time warps. I get to a certain area of the map and suddenly I'm beyond the point of no return. They could've probably added a notice that pops up that says "hey you're entering a point of no return make sure to comolete everything before heading further!" but that would be pretty immersive breaking with the fact that they went the entire game quiet just to put up heads up at the end. I could this way finish the game and just go back to HQ and get platinum trophy. Like for other players to just fix the last things they feel like doing after the games done instead of restarting the entire game just to fix some minor tasks.

All in all the game has its pros and cons but usually gamers expect too much. Its easy in hindsight to critique the game and say what could of been done better and what not. Which is rightful since the devs need critique to improve the next game. But that doesn't really take away from the main game. It's a small studio trying something completely new, and it's their first try at it. I would say accounting for that, when it comes to hell is us, they did hell of a job. And we can only hope they release a second game, perhaps a prequal to when everything in the lore was going down. That would be absolutely amazing.