I think you're overstating how impactful it actually was. I've got around 300 hours in the game, and panic has almost never been the reason I've died. Even when I used the auto-drink alcohol mix, I didn't become panic-free. It reduced panic a bit at most, but it definitely didn't make the mechanic irrelevant in my experience. As for hunger, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that people could stay full all day. A 2L bottle could only be up to 49% milk, so that's roughly 48 hunger worth of milk spread across dozens of small sips over a long period. That's nowhere near enough to replace eating meals. If there were edge cases where certain mixtures or values were genuinely broken, then sure, those should be fixed. But saying auto-drink made you panic-free and never hungry all day sounds like an exaggeration. From my experience, it simply wasn't that powerful.

I mean bag of chicken nuggets contains 3 nuggets.  Maybe there's some creative license being exercised for gameplay.

Yeah, this is an old bug, for a few versions now. The work around I found is to either stand at least 2 tiles from the shore line, or build flooring for a dock that surrounds your character. The point is that if the fish hits "land" before it gets to your character, you will catch the fish. I found that at least 2 tiles between your character and the "land" works best.

What's bad for the game is how unrefrigerated milk doesn't spoil in a day and how a cow produces 40 L/day at 600 kcal/L. Fix spoilage and you don't have combat milk anymore regardless of restrictions on auto-drinking. They also need to fix how strong alcohol quenches your thirst instead of making it worse. 

I'm currently recording gameplay to try to recreate it. I've recorded a couple of "OK" examples. But I'm waiting for a really good example to show on here and I'll upload it.