Of course it had aerial dodges, the backflip had huge amounts of invincibility, and just being airborne made you not worry about some AOE attacks, like the punch to the ground.
Yeah, I get that. But the other systems require direct input, you can't just hold O and hope everything happens. I totally get not liking this basic element of the design and hating the way the game feels because of it, but even though using the same basic combo over and over again in a character action game feels better, it's still boring and shallow as hell. If every system in the game was just hold O and watch Noctis doing the appropriate animation, then yeah, it would be boring as fuck. But as it is, if you're bored with the combat, there are tools to make it more involved and fun, just like in a character action game. It'll feel better and more responsive to be bored in DMC, but it's still boring.
As I said, I'm not claiming this is DMC, but people are ignoring a huge chunk of the game's depth when they say "So, is the combat still hold-button-to-attack while enjoying the animations?". It implies that it's all you do, and as nice as some gifs may look, all you're doing is holding the button. The gif you posted yourself when you said that wasn't cool to look at, it looked weird and it didn't flow well, because he was just going thorugh the exact same motions. If you don't mix it up, neither will Noctis.
So when Dante skates on enemies in DMC3, is that the same? It's context sensitive, they must be knocked down, and even though there is no prompt on screen, you do one motion and he'll do the cool thing that he can't do outside of this context.
Is suplexing people just "a cool movie" in RE4-6? Context sensitive actions that are triggered by the player's actions, that are always consistent in the same situation and need to be manually set up are not separated from gameplay, they're very much a part of it. The visual reward is incentive for you to set it up, not to mention the numbers. Doing a coup-de-grâce in RE6 isn't just the game showing you a cool movie when you press the button on screen, you have to set it up yourself. It's not a scripted event that you'll always do it in a certain moment to a certain enemy, if you don't do a "double stun" or explore some weakness like enemies that automatically go into a coup-state when you throw a flash grenade, it won't happen. It's not because there isn't a dedicated button to do that animation at any given time that it's not part of the gameplay. Are super moves in Fighting Game not part of the gameplay? I just do the same motion as a regular projectile, but I press two buttons, and they do this cool-looking animation.
I feel like people's hate for QTE (that I do share) is so overblown that they see a prompt on screen and their immediate reaction is to use the same criticism they do for QTEs. It's not the same situation. Being consistent, player-driven and optional make it different. As I gave the example with the bird parry/counter, you can just jump, warp past the bird and use fire. There you go, all manual. They're not taking basic possibilities away from you to hide in movies, they're just making a bunch of unique contextual animations for parries and counters. They could always have the same short animation for every enemy, but they chose not to.
Ironically, given my position in this thread, I still prefer mashing.