The recent focus on parrying in a bunch of games has noticeably diminished the effectiveness of other defensive options.
Other example, Nioh2 has by far the greatest amount of defensive options, any of them work well. Block, dodge, timed parry, counterattacks, baked-in evasive moves, armored attacks, and if you mistime one of the timing-reliant methods, you aren't completely screwed. Most importantly, all of the attacks are cleanly telegraphed and almost none of them have any goofy ass feints nor enemies holding their swing for several seconds.
Meanwhile Rise of the Ronin is hyper autistic about timed parrying. Blocking is a death sentence for how much stamina you lose from even one attack, dodging is almost impossible against many attacks with obscene tracking, and you have to parry a consecutive half-dozen attacks from virtually every enemy (who get to hyperarmor out of your combos whenever they want), each with awkward staggered timing, nebulous animations, and attacks intentionally having multiple startup animations for the same attack so you can't get a feel for nor read the attack. If you mistime even one of those parries, you're going to die.
The modern trend of chasing shitty Sekiro parrying (when games used to have more variety) and hyper-lethal damage has been a tragedy for the human race.