Some things are worse if you pay attention. Team mates will make start cutting towards the basket, then when you hit pass, they will stop dead (taking advantage of the button press to action lag) and run behind an opposing team mate. By the time the player actually passes, the opposing player is in position and gets a cheap steal. It's kind of a progression of the cutting towards the basket then freezing in place when an oop is thrown from last year.
Sometimes the game will take control of your player and steer you in to steals up to 1/4 court away.
Things like this are much worse in 2K22... so no they didn't make the AI better or more able to compete. Instead they compensated by making the cheating much worse.