This game suffered from what I'd say is being "too retro".
There's quite a number of things that used to be quite common in games back in the day that are considered poor game design these days. Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing to question the status quo from time to time, but that's not what's going on here, here we are just shown why these things generally aren't done anymore today.
This game has quite a few of those, like: pixel perfect jumping, needing perfect timing, needing to stay on a platform that moves at a different speed than you, jumping and moving easily going too far as a challenge of the game, a level that has you do the same boring jump over and over again, while it can easily go wrong if you pay slightly less attention to it and following up a hard piece of a level with more pieces that can easily go wrong and reset you to before the hard piece.