yeah it's a lot about minimizing friction between your intent and the in-game action. buffers that are too narrow feel bad, especially when there's any input or response delay, but it also feels bad if it's too loose and you get locked into some shit you pressed a minute ago. witcher 3 had a bunch of weird momentum on the movement that people really didn't like at launch because of the disconnect it created.

there's also stuff like consonance between your input and the game, down to jump would be a terrible input most of the time.

for tomb raider in particular iirc there's a thing with the QTE mashing where there's a rhythm to it because if you mash too fast it skips cycles, and that feels awful. we just shouldn't have quicktime events in games though.