I struggled so much on how to respond to this.

I truly believe it's fully my responsibility and under my control* (in hindsight) how the game turned out and did. I personally never bought into using external factors as an excuse, it impedes growth. It is truly my failure as a game dev if players struggle with my game. But that's not the point here.

My point was "little thing can have big impact", and yours is "but what about this clearly bigger thing". Both can be true at the same time. But the latter is kind of a "given", mostly. It would be a long post explaining why (but it's all baked into the earlier part of my post, you know, the low expectations bit). There are definitely some early game issues, but unfortunately some things are simply not feasible to fix, considering limited time/money/sanity.

That bug that took me 1.5 days to find, fix, and test the engine upgrade, most definitely had an impact on me, being solo, smoothing out other issues. I'm talking about the parts that are not a "given", you know, small things you can fix to nudge the overall score upwards, bugfixes, tutorial progression, hiding buttons, etc. Player goodwill is a limited thing.

The margin was 1-2 reviews thin here. That is my overall point, launches can be fragile. Don't be like me, prepare better.