I agree it's not realistic/authentic, but this is still a video game and you need to take liberties to keep up engagement - it's unfortunately a necessary evil.
Says who? This sounds like "conventional wisdom" that just becomes taken as gospel because it was said enough times.
We don't have data on how many copies of these new games are selling but engagement doesn't seem good. It takes forever to find games even with crossplay, and they have put the game on like five massive sales and its been out for a couple months. Anecdotally, there are lots of people returning to older games, especially NHL 94, 2004, and 2014/legacy, and I personally know quite a few people that run the gamut from casual hockey fan to hardcore fan that want nothing to do with the new games because of the Fortnite on ice/Harlem globetrotters on ice direction the game has taken. There are tens of thousands of posts on a forum dedicated to reviving/rebuilding NHL 2004, which is a 20 year old game from four console generations ago that takes some work to get to run on modern computers.
If by "engagement" you mean the 1% of players who watch influencer videos and buy $100s of dollars of HUT packs every year then yeah, engagement seems good.
"Lets make a deke that happens twice a year controlled by one button", "lets make skating backwards with the puck a viable offensive strategy", "lets remove poke checking and pass interceptions from the game", "lets make skating insanely responsive and remove momentum and acceleration from the game" are all decisions in the past decade meant to cater to these so-called "casual" players that have resulted in this game being on life support.
