Yah I noticed this immediately after I started playing again. Attack animations are smooth until you hit anything (rocks, mobs, trees) with any weapon and then the animation completely stops for maybe 1/4-1/2 a second. Your character literally becomes completely frozen mid animation. It has the appearance of a stutter / frame skip.

I played for ~150 hours and don't recall this happening previously around Feb / March when the game launched. If it was always like this, I have no idea how I didn't notice until now. I do really hope this is a bug and not some undocumented change or design decision because it looks really bad. I'm surprised there aren't more people talking about this. Maybe because with camera shake being on by default it largely masks the problem. I personally can't stand the obnoxiously strong camera shake so this animation problem is very apparent.

I made a clip showcasing the problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWEye3jN69I