...and later you spam Thaumaturgy spells like Call Destruction to kill whatever you want.

I suppose, but there's a grand total of two(?) enemies you need to bother killing, and you still get nothing for the effort.

At least the stats and equipment had some benefit in U7. In U8, they're worthless. You can reach max stats in less than an hour and you won't notice a difference for having them. The "legendary" weapons you can find are pointless too. The only one worth using is the one with a 10% chance of instantly killing the target.

Even in a series that was never known for stellar combat mechanics, U8 is the rock bottom.

You're probably playing it on a much faster pace than was normal back when it originally released. At least when I played it, the frame rate was low enough that it was pretty easy to manually control the Avatar. If you had a long-range melee weapon like a halbert, you could also use it to take a step back when an opponent was about to strike to move out of its range, then attack with the halberd and hit the enemy, rinse and repeat. If you're playing it at a "high" framerate, that tactic is impossible as everything just zooms around.