Haha, definitely not entirely a skill issue! The difficulty is not balanced in the slightest. The sizes of the "slider" minigame was changed to fix a bug, and I think the alignment wasn't set correctly. It was close enough to not be noticed during the bug-fix window.
The bug where you freeze in place when interacting with ingredients was by far our biggest oversight. We shrimply forgot to fix that, but if we continue work on this, it will absolutely be fixed!
Thank you for the feedback, and I'm glad you found the experience to be polished (for the most part) and mechanically deep!