Was the second half of DS1 really as bad as people claim it is?

Most people agree on the second half of DS1 being rushed and quite bad compared to the iconic status of the first half of the game. Did you find it as bad though? I've not played DS1 till the end myself, so I can't tell. From what I've heard and seen on YouTube as well as judging by From's self-assessment, the second half was a little rushed, thus leading to the drop in quality. Is that true?

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Lost Izalith, one of the most lore-heavy areas in the game, the birthplace of demons and chaos, has a bunch of copypaste demon legs surrounded by blinding lava. It had the potential to be a very cool map, but it's straightforward and not really that interesting, save for a couple things. The boss is considered one of the, if not the worst all-time fromsoft boss. So yeah, you can tell it was rushed.
Other areas don't feel as rushed, like The Duke's Archives, or the Tomb of Giants, but I can see people disliking those for the navigation challenges.
To me, everything after O&S just feels too linear compared to the start of the game. You get the lordvessel, making backtracking unnecessary, and the areas you have to visit feel more like 4 linear paths, instead of a semi-open world, since there are no alternative paths (like the depths/new londo/darkroot -> blightown) or crazy shortcuts (like the parish -> back to firelink).
So yeah, I don't enjoy the last half as much, but it's for game design reasons as well as lack of polish, although one could argue that the "worse" (imo) game design is in part due to a lack of polish too.
- Yeah, I mean, part of not rushing things is being able to iterate on the design. They might've noticed during playtesting that the second half felt worse, but changing the map to introduce more cross connections and maybe changing the lordvessel to work differently, that means additional dev work and additional playtesting.

I didn't like it as much as I liked the first half, but I definitely wouldn't call it bad by any means