On the note of "meaningful" combat

This game feels genuinely miserable to play right now. After playing 0.1, I thought this was the "worst" it was going to get and I had fun in the end, but now it's even worse, by far.

The only time the combat feels "meaningful" is when fighting bosses. When there's one enemy to fight, there's some skill potentially involved because I can actually move out of the way of individual attacks while continuing to do damage.

But 99% of the gameplay is not "meaningful". I feel like a deer in the headlights trying to get a hit in while ridiculously fast and aggressive enemies constantly swarm me. It just doesn't feel good. It's not "hard", because I feel like there's very little player skill involved on my end. I stop, I die. I run, I don't die.

The scaling is "perfect" if you want players to feel powerless; there's 0 sense of any player power. I'm now at maps and never once during the campaign did I feel like my build is "taking off". It was a slog and continues to be a slog.

I constantly feel threatened by something. I have to be constantly on my toes or some random white mob is going to chunk me for half of my HP. It's tiring. For a game you're supposed to grind a lot in (Grinding Gear Games? Right? That's still the plan?), it's mentally taxing.

The combat is just me running/rolling away in panic. I'm playing a half-decent build (ED+C), yet my entire gameplay is rolling/running away in panic while enemies that are 2-3x as fast as me keep flailing at me until the DoT kills them.