1 & 2. It's not 1% and it is silly to claim that, there are tens of thousands of individuals who are annoyed enough about design decisions to post on forums about it and a lot of them point toward Fortnite and Apex as the inspiration for these design decisions. There would be even more who would be unhappy who aren't posting. Every single game I have played the team chat is full of the same comments about the game being like Apex or Fortnite, I would suggest you turn on team chat and witness the same.
3. The persistent data issues, game crashes and rubber banding have increased for a lot of users. PC users can't play unless they look up where to delete their profile settings to reset key bindings. Kits not loading in is becoming more persistent for a lot of players. I can't give you stats for this because there is no "history of all game errors crashes log for all players", but the game is behaving like launch except with server systems having to deal with much fewer players. I would say that's a step backwards, if you game performs as bad or worse when under 40% server loads compared to 100% servers in use at launch day.
The only thing that has improved is gunplay after decreasing random bloom, and being able to see incoming medics.
4. Battlefield tracker stats for BF4 and BF1
https://battlefieldtracker.com/bf1/insights/population?days=-1
https://i.imgur.com/TKxIWN5.png
https://steamcharts.com/app/1517290
https://steamcharts.com/app/1238810#48h
Battlefield games in the past have held players for 4 or so months before significant declines in player numbers.
Currently BF2042 has gone from 100,000 peak players to 34,000 on steam, it is sitting only 14000 players above BFV which has 20,000 players (Note BFV had 86,000 players on steam in October, and 89,000 in September in the lead up to BF2042).
BF2042 has gone from top 5 most played games on xbox store to 20th, coming in just ahead of Skyrim.
Generally Battlefield games stay around the top 10 for several months, usually sitting in front or behind Destiny.
BF2042 has reportedly sold around 4 million or so copies, which is around 1.6x what BF4 sold and around 1.2x what BF1 sold within the same period.
So despite selling more copies the game has fewer players within 2 weeks of release compared with BF1 and BF4 several months after release on selected platforms.
There aren't stats available that I could find for Playstation.
5.The entire last three days has been memes and backlash as a result of the Santa outfit with several people quitting / getting fired from high level positions because it brought so much attention. To say its a "few" is entirely wrong.
6. See point 5 - it blew up and became such an issue that the games lead has been replaced, and several other producers / executives.
7. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/battlefield-franchise-undergoes-major-shake-up/1100-6498521/
The "shared connected universe" was announced by EA and Dice. The BR hero shooter has not been specifically announced and as said in the first post that it is a rumour.
I prefaced the post subject with "supposedly". The first words of the first sentence was "In rumour news", so I made it clear that it is not "fact".
However, the person who you refer to as "guessing" has been on the ball regarding a lot of aspects of BF2042 - number of players, setting, map names, specialists, BF3 being included in someway (by way of portal), dog drones, natural disasters being a theme of the game, screenshots of the reveal trailer prior to announcement.
I would think you can't guess a screenshot of a reveal trailer.
I take what Tom Henderson says with a grain of salt and he has been wrong about other things, but I would not dismiss this rumour.
I believe that unless there is enough pushback from the community or what you would call "crying" then it is quite likely EA will pursue this and try and make a BR Hero shooter Battlefield.
