I absolutely love feedback like this! Thanks for taking the time to play through the game to the end - I'm glad you enjoyed it even despite the last few stages!
Just to share my thoughts since your feedback was so detailed - we originally came up with the ghosts as a sort of "final escalation" of the game - intending them to add some extra "act quick!" energy to the last couple stages - similar to how something like "SHIFT" has its final escalation with the spike wall. Tho I do agree with you, I think that generally, we picked wrong when it came to what mechanic to introduce to accomplish this.
That said, there were lots of ways I think the ghosts could have worked much better. For example, we could have made the ghosts wait to move until the player does at first, giving you time to plan your path. On that same vein, it would have helped even just making the pause screen background transparent, allowing you to hold the ghosts in place at will to strategize your next moves. Like you suggested, even going as far to stop the ghosts from moving until the player does would have helped. Something else we've talked about since the jam ended was maybe adding walled-areas you can hide in that the ghosts can't see you in, which kinda gets the best of all of these ideas. Point is, there were lots of ways we could have made them better, I think, but we just ended up missing all of them, so instead the only real thing the ghosts added was frustration as they corner the player for the 20th time :P
But yeah, imo, Kristen absolutely killed it with the level design, especially on the first 14 stages before it starts to lean more into a precision platformer + ghost dodger, and I think in future jams we're definitely going to lean more into the kinds of things that worked so well for those levels. We've definitely learned a lot from this year's jam to make next year's even better!
But yeah, just thought I'd share my thoughts since you gave such solid feedback, and I'm definitely glad you enjoyed the majority of the game! We're super proud of what we put out this year, so it means a lot to see people playing it all the way to the end :)