This is less a complaint about Gears 5 and more in regard to the entire series since Gears 3. I like it as an idea, but ever since it was introduced in Gears 3 it’s never really seemed to work properly. Everyone already knows about the problems with the mechanic, like being vacuumed into someone else’s kick, or performing a kick of your own and it counting as a miss despite the character models touching, but it seems like TC (and Epic before them) never made much effort to try and fix it.
It was spoken about a lot before G3’s release, the devs talked about it in interviews and stuff and it seemed like a cool new way to add depth to cover combat, but it just never seems to work properly, 4 games into its existence. Its been around for 9 years and it’s just sort of silently accepted that it never works, yet nobody does anything about it.