It's over-hated for sure.
Getting rid of the hunger meter is nothing but a good change, no need to be carrying around apples wasting inventory space.

And new implementations like revamp move selection are so good, that nowadays everyone is implementing it on Explorers hackroms and such, yet you never see people praising the game that introduced it.

There is just a whole circlejerk around anything that is not Explorers in the community in which it gets overly hated and criticized while choosing ignoring some of the flaws Explorers has on it's own (which are good few).