Souls games aren't remotely clunky. You mentioned hitboxes but they're pretty on point in most every case. The only time it gets wonky is when things can grab you which isn't very often. Bloodborne was way way worse for that. The first boss just fucking teleports you into his hands the second the animation starts.
The "clunk" comes from the fact it's not spammable. You have to actually play properly or you get heavily punished. Dodging is extremely precise, so is parrying. There's no real question, the combat is great. You either don't like it or you're bad at it but the combat itself isn't bad, objectively.
Most general physics are fine as well. Jumping can be a bit awkward but there's like 6 instances of needing to jump across the series so meh. Only time physics got wonky is when DSfix turned Dark Souls 1 from 30 to 60 FPS and broke everything.
Most of the flaws are pretty minor. Darks Souls 1 punished you heavily for repeatedly dying with diminishing health, Dark Souls 2 heavily punished newbies with soul memory which determined how you'd get matched and your soul memory would go up even if you lost souls and didn't get to invest them. Dark Souls 3 made armor pretty much a fashion equip slot (that one is debatably good tbh).
Most of what people have an actual problem with is death feeling 'cheap' in a lot of cases falling for traps but to be honest if you play carefully and expect bad things to happen, you basically never die to those traps. It's not like they're unavoidable you just have to understand what you're playing. I made it through half of Dark Souls 2 and 3 without doing more than once or twice since 1 and Demon's Souls trained me well.
It's an overused phrase but in this case it's pretty accurate when people cry about the combat
Just git gud.
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