I'm surprised it's still a problem. Years ago a basketball game franchise bragged that the PS3 allowed them to do foot planting with inverse kinematics. Years before that, Shadow of the Colossus shipped on PS2... with IK foot planting.
People don't want the realistic, slow response. Normally people aren't aware of how early their body starts a movement, the conscious brain has the illusion of just having decided it but it's actually started much earlier.
That's it, there's the tradeoff; if they want legs to move naturally, they have to fight against what the user inputs. There's a setting in the Witcher 3 so that the character can turn on a dime / instantly, less realistic but more fun / responsive: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/difference-between-standard...
And games with fancy animations are often not just less responsive, but also less controllable in general: in Witcher 3 the character cannot walk backwards or turn in place, so you can literally fall off a cliff in front of you by trying to walk away from it. In terms of movement the only difference between Geralt and his horse is the turning radius.