Yes, it’s a bad game. You’re allowed to like it anyway, I love it as well. It is charming, and I have fond memories with it, but it has pretty major technical and design flaws. The tag barrel system and the ability to only collect certain collectables as certain kongs (namely the blueprints) adds hours of pointless backtracking. Then there’s also the fact that it barely runs on the n64 and lags all the time. Rare introduced a crude delta time implementation that sped up the player’s movement to compensate, but that causes all kinds of jank and issues with the collision. A common saying in the speed run community is that “walls are optional” in DK64. Now from what I understand, you do have to try to clip through a wall, but not very hard (and I have seen people clip out of bounds accidentally in certain areas as well).

If you must play that game nowadays, I recommend using the “tag anywhere” patch, which lets you switch kongs with the dpad, and the “free trade agreement”patch, which makes it so blueprints and golden bananas can be picked up by any Kong. And play it on Project64. It cuts out most of the lag which circumvents most of that weird speed up jank, in addition to just being a smoother experience.