People who shit on the controls have no idea what they're talking about. Everything was designed to mimic the thought process that goes into real life environment traversal.
The game teaches you to walk to the edge and judge the distance of the gap, or the depth of a drop. There is a button modifier (L1) that gives you total safety as you approach the edge slowly. As long as you hold this button in, you will not fall, and it becomes second nature to hold it in whenever you see a ledge. Compare and contrast this to modern games like new Tomb Raider, Ass Creed, Prince of Persia, Uncharted etc. They just have you moving the analog stick haphazardly up to the edge until whoops, you fell off, but the character conveniently auto-grabbed the edge so it's all okay. They invented this auto-grab solution to fix a problem (running off the edge) which the old digital controls already solved with the L1 button.
The auto-grab solution is hand-holding too, because it removes the real danger element completely:
Old TR games - gives you the tools to prevent falling, but if you fall off then you are fucked (as it should be)
New games - lets you fall all the time due to having less tools to prevent it, but if you fall off you are always saved (ultimately no danger)
This auto-grab way of doing things is not how people function in real-life. What is more accurate - that a real-life climber would slowly and carefully plan out their next move first, or would they just blast ahead and make the mistake but magically be saved? It doesn't even introduce any excitement into the game because the auto-grab will always just... work. In most new games it's not manually triggered as a last moment thing to avoid death, unless they add some QTE grab mechanic.
The running jump in the old games was also more realistic than what has come after. You can break many jumps in the old TR games down like this (in fact you are even taught this in Lara's gym):
1. Carefully move to the edge. Judge the distance.
2. If you need to, take a step back.
3. Run to the edge and jump over the gap.
Literally everyone in real life will jump over a gap like this unless you are a parkour psychopath. But then 'parkour' seems to be all that modern platforming is to game devs. Every modern fucking game like Uncharted has you running through the jungle at mach speed, not needing to take any run ups or think at all. It's just leaping all over the place like a monkey on speed. No thought, no stakes, practically plays itself.
