after they dropped Wu Lin (chinese characters) and then Vortiger, the quality of animations for new characters started to drop little by little. Then they dropped CCU (aka core combat update), it's goal was to establish the "attacking" meta, which, translating from community manager speak, means that they intentionally sped up lots of attack animations, narrowing the parry windows, making them look ridiculous, and in some cases making some of them practically impossible to react to. In modern FH you can win by basically button-mashing your opponent to death.

Also, since then they have added lots of characters that either look out of place thematically, or have some kind of cancerous abilities, or both in some cases. I'm not an expert on the matter of modern For Honor, since i left when CCU dropped.