I agree. This style of handling is common in newer NFS games and probably what I miss the most from the older games. I particularly dislike the grip-vs-drift upgrades, especially since drift is mostly “press X to drift”.
That being said, I did find some cars fun to drive in once they’re tuned a little, and I liked that different cars could have significantly different feel, which unfortunately can’t be said about all NFS games, especially the newer ones.
I thought the same until I played Heat a couple of years ago. Heat is solid and definitely reminds you of the golden age of NFS with Underground and Most Wanted.
I think they run a lot of compute shader, so that they can offload part of the simulation to the GPU, so anything that reduces the utilization of the GPU could improve performance overall.