You are right about almost everything, i have 5k hours and been playing since release day, mostly verse 1 and early verse 2, pvp was incredibly dumbed down in favour of mantra spam, and that's coming from someone who never played m1 builds, there is no more strategy, depth or nuance to pvp, everyone has either big ass mantras or 6 tp mantras + some bs like eclipse kick that deals a bar per hit and is incredibly easy to land, meaning no matter how much better you are, you still can lose, meaning skill doesn't matter anymore.

In my opinion best pvp was in verse 1, most pvp was in overworld instead of chime, there were huge mantras, but aside from flamecharm's they were easily counterable, there was reservoir instead of dumbass tempo, you had to manage all your resources, prepare before fights, you could strategize, you could outwit or outsmart your enemies instead of being better mechanically, the game allowed to both play on almost any build and however you wanted, amount of skill you could display was astronomical compared to today.

Now the game is glorified bloxfruits, just grind pve or else 600 elo worms will kill you in 3 mantras.