I've noticed all this too. I think the initial settings were not working correctly or were simply wrong so they fixed them. I played all their games on tweaked medium settings for batting but, in c22, I had to put it to hardest and was still finding batting too easy. With the new patch, batting became super difficult for me.There's been some obvious & some not so obvious behind the scenes changes to certain sliders, timings, shot timings, etc. in this last patch & it's not entirely clear that they were actually intentional (again).
I completely wiped my C22 a few hours after this most recent patch due to so many ongoing problems & noticed after looking through following this latest patch that there were several changes to some very long term defaults, (they'd been the same for years & for good reason). Also noticed that even though everything was 100% fresh, some values are set at some really odd numbers, but if you then highlight them & click the relevant button to revert them to their defaults they change again even though they were technically already at their defaults with a 100% fresh install. (Don't ask me what on earth is going on there but not exactly surprised.) Some of these values that seem to have double settings throws certain things off even more. I suspect the changes to the timings is a part of it as many are now essentially mis-timing frequently & will be for some time unless the defaults are reverted or anyone who's played previously will have to completely rewire the timings in their heads they've been used to for so long, especially for online play where there's no option to change the local sliders, or for those that may still elect to play both C19 & C22 where the timings had always been the same until this last patch. But, other areas such as the shot force may also be affected by this sudden change.
Until a patch or so ago, even though the default hard bowling ball marker timing was always set to 21, as another example, it was still out & was triggering far, far too late regardless of the slider value itself. (The slider timing was ineffective & didn't match an actual hard coded timing.) They've since fixed that & the timing is now correct but if it's this easy to mess a sliders hard coding regardless of the actual slider value we see, then it wouldn't be hard to unfortunately mess with any other timings, numbers, values, & so on, that can affect shot force etc. All of a sudden, everything is out of sync or out of whack to what you're used to.
The values and settings you had originally were most likely tied to your profile and not just the game. Also, a default value now could be different to an original value and, if you had tweaked any settings, the game would be converting your old values into the new ones.