Every edition has parts where the mechanics don't line up well with a "realistic" narrative. While playing D&D, we always have to smooth over the rough spots.
Maybe those bumps stood out worse for you in 4e (which is fine!) but 4e was not objectively worse for the phenomenon - it was just what it is.
Speaking for myself, 4e provided the most verisimilitudinous D&D experience I've had.
Combat made sense (because the whole "ablation of hp" thing was carried through to its logical conclusion, including proportionate recovery), and felt vibrant (because the effects inflicted gave a strong correlation to the fiction of the attacks, and the movement about the battlefield was very dynamic).
The progression of the PCs made sense, with the tiers of play underpinning that - for instance, the game was set up so that characters who have the power of demigods or gods could expect to be regarded, by the inhabitants of the imaginary world, in an appropriate way - they could liberate kingdoms, bandy words with Primordials, etc, and the skill challenge framework made these situations able to be resolved in a systematic way rather than relying just on player-GM negotiation.
The cosmology, and the integration of the Monster Manual into that cosmology, also supported PC progression and the tiers of play. And so did the way NPC/creature stat blocks were presented, and the way those stat blocks worked. I can't imagine how using the AD&D stat block for Orcus would be as easy, or produce the same sort of excitement in play, as when
the PCs in my 4e game assaulted Orcus in his throne room.The ease of using the swarm rules to build Hobgoblin phalanxes, flights of Vrocks, etc, and then to actually adjudicate them in play.
So much of it just worked.
