Don't worry, godot devs forgetting pre-instancing is a common pit fall so you're not alone.
I guess yeah the horizontality would be better if there were like caves more frequently.
Well, sure that's a solution, but the fact is that circling is only effective (actually, the only way to not die) because of the AI being on your ass too much, so Omni-sprinting would be a fix but there'd need to be more for the game to not have circling as an issue.