They have done several things I think could have been done better, but I do think a lot of the criticisms are over the top. This was always going to be a game that was incredibly difficult to adapt, and games in general are, because they are far less grounded than TV on average. Suspension of disbelief is baked in from the jump. It's far harder to translate to TV. There was no world in which having a teenager fight grown men was going to look believable. They could get away with this in season 1 because Joel was there to save Ellie. In season 2, it was going to be an unavoidable problem, I said this after season 1 ended. But that's on the game, not the show. Unless they have Ellie not fight at all, which would take away from it, they tried to do it as believably as they could. It's honestly laughable in the game too, this teenager is the fucking terminator. How many grown ass men plus infected do you kill in a playthrough if you don't go the stealth route? Over 100 probably. And that's just NPCs.
I have some direction choice gripes they went with the show, and I think it could've been better, but in terms of the source material they had to work with, I think overall it's still a high quality product compared to other video game adaptations.
We'll see what they end up doing in the final episodes here, because there's some things they could do that would really hurt the experience for me. I'm bracing for Ellie sparing Nora or her dying accidentally or something instead of being brutalized. Crossing my fingers the writers didn't bitch out. They didn't with Joel's death, so if they do with some of these other deaths then it's because they were afraid to make Ellie unlikeable and that would be a cowardly decision.