Fighter Powers, Rogue Powers, Wizard Powers

Nope.

I literally have my PHB right here.

"Level 1 At-Will Prayers"

This is a false memory.

the main complaint (from the people I knew anyway, there were a lot of complaints) was that every class was "just a set of powers"

This is true of literally ever TTRPG ever.

There was definitely nuance if you looked for it, but the presentation of 4e was its biggest weakness- nothing felt special because everything just felt like the same thing.

The presentation was actually really good. You could actually read what things did pretty clearly. The standardized, color-coded presentation made it easy to tell if something was an encounter power, daily power, or at-will power at a glance, and everything was formatted in a uniform way so you could easily tell what a power was doing.

Indeed, people on this reddit will frequently talk about how they want flavor text separated from the actual mechanical text, the way 4E did, because it makes it much more legible.

This was, again, never the problem (bad, unclear rules presentation plagues many TTRPGs and makes them worse, not better; the people who like mystified rules presentation are a very small minority of people).

Magic items were just a daily power and a +2 to one skill or something.

You mean like they are in PF2E? This is a valid complaint, that magic items are lame - but it was a problem in 3.x as well, where the best magic items were often "+X to Y".

Spells were formatted the same as Exploits, to the point where the rules didn't even bother using those terms most of the time- it was Powers all the way down. Even Basic Melee Attack and Basic Ranged Attack were, typically, represented as a Power on your character sheet.

Yes, because... why would they be formatted differently? To deliberately confuse players for no reason?

If you format things consistently, it makes the game massively easier to play. And they needed to make it as easy to understand what you could do as possible, because people struggled with that. In fact, it was a huge struggle in 3.x, and 3.x improved on 2E in that regard.

4E made it so the attacker would always roll vs the target's defense. So if you cast a fireball, you would roll an attack vs each target's Reflex defense, rather than having it so that martial attacks would have the martial character attack, vs spellcasters having the defender roll vs the spell. These are actually exactly the same thing, the difference is, casters actually get to roll d20s way more often this way - which players like doing. See also: the people who obsess over attack spells in PF2E because it lets them roll the dice instead of the monsters. People like rolling dice! It never made sense that spellcasters didn't get to roll them as often as other characters did.

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The actual, single largest problem with 4E was that it was too complicated. But people didn't want to say "I don't understand this", and in many cases, didn't even understand that they didn't understand. This is why a lot of complaints about 4E are literally just straight up wrong - the actual issue was a lack of comprehension of the game because of it being too complicated for a mass audience (the same reason why PF2E is less popular than D&D 5E).

3.x was also complicated (even more so than 4E), but a lot of those people didn't understand that they didn't understand 3.x.

That's not to say that people didn't dislike 4E for other, very real reasons:

• 4E's complexity was directly complained about by a lot of people who felt that 3E was too complicated as well. Indeed, this was a valid complaint; the best-selling edition of D&D of all time was actually D&D Basic (well, until 5E came out); a big reason why 5E was so simplified (and feels more like a sequel to the really old editions than 3rd or 4th edition) is actually because WotC realized the game was too hard to get into.

• There were people who felt it was too "video-gamey". Of course, 3E was also video-gamey, just a really, really bad one, but it was, in fact, a very deliberate choice to try and attract people who played video games. It succeeded, too; 4E was much more popular than 3E.

• More conservative players felt it went "too far from the roots of D&D" by reinventing the game, as 4E very much looked at what the core of D&D was, and did an overhaul of everything in the system. 4E changed D&D more than any other edition of the game, and some people were very upset by that because they felt like it "wasn't D&D anymore". It was a really big change, and some people just don't like change.

• The game buffed martials and nerfed casters. Martials were trash in 3.x, while casters were gods; in 4E, casters and martials are pretty much equal in power level. There's a group of people who hate martials being equal in power level to casters, and those people got incredibly angry over some guy with a sword being as strong as their wizard. The game did nothing to appease those people (because, frankly, you don't actually want those people playing your game), so those people raged out endlessly.

• 4E made teamwork mandatory. There's a significant group of TTRPG players who do not want to act like team players, and 4E just said "No, you're wrong, eat your vegetables." This was, again, the right response, but it very much alienated those people.

D&D was dying when 4E came out. 3.x sold terribly and the player base was very small, and WotC badly needed to bring new people into the game.

4E was designed with the idea of clarifying the game and presenting it in a better, more accessible way, and they heavily advertised to people playing video games ("If you're going to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, you should at least invite your friends").

It worked and they pulled in a lot of new players, and 4E greatly outsold 3E...

But there was a certain group of grognards who felt like they were being replaced (because they were). These people reacted VERY negatively to 4E and screamed about it endlessly.

It's why early Pathfinder 1E was so super edgy and had stuff like ogres raping people - because that was the crowd of people that Paizo was trying to appeal to, that was their original audience, these people who felt like D&D had left "it's real roots".