One of the things that don't exist anymore in NH but was still a thing in NL is villagers can move in and most importantly out without you noticing, because you can only convince them to stay if you catch them the day they decide to move.
In NH they're basically stuck with you forever until they tell you they consider moving, and then you can tell them not too. And you can also try to choose a new villager by meeting random ones on desert islands (though you can still just leave it completely to chance too). Depending on who you ask, some prefer the bit of simulated independence, others can't stand the idea of their "dream villager" leaving if they missed the day.
By the way the same masked rabbit is living in my NH town right now! She's called Grisette in French.
NH tends to be "softer" in general, and I do regret some choices too, including that one a bit, but I think it would have been a lot harder to maintain to go back to all those little choices and put toggles on them. Especially with all the complaints around everything that was "wrong" back around NH's debut (with people arguing a lot about how wrong it was).
There has been a lot of QoL added to updates, which makes me think they did hear some of the most common annoyances people had, but if you weren't there around the first months, you can't imagine the level of drama going on.
Including stuff that were only problems because of people making up their own rules and getting upset when it was not streamlined enough.
I don't hear a lot about that anymore, but there was a lot of people trying for a better online player economy (...yeah, not sure why). Their problem was the most common currency, bells, was too easy to cheese/get through cheating. So they turned to another "currency", the Nook Miles Ticket. Since you get it from miles, and miles are rewarded for actually imteracting with the game a lot, it felt more "valuable" to them (hell, they put proof of work into freaking Animal Crossing).
Since normally tickets have only one purpose on-game and that's visiting a singular mystery island, the miles redeeming machine only gives one ticket at a time with a fairly long interaction. For normal use, it's completely fine. But of course people wanting to use them as money complained s lot about how long it is to spit out a hundred "NMTs".