But if people complain that Numanuma is too text heavy and the combat is shit, that strikes me as disingenuous - PS:T was exactly that.
The difference is that Planescape was wordy with interesting text. Numanuma feels like every single word that was written shipped with the game, even the design documents and meeting memos.
Example:
Numanuma is so overwritten that it describes what you're literally seeing with your very own eyes. There's nothing in this text that I can't see by myself, it's 105% useless.
Now Planescape:
Oh look, PST was written by people who knows the audience have eyes, so they don't need to write "you see a big fucking book with a guy writing on it" - they use text to ADD details that you can't see.
FFS, PST doesn't even describes Morte. You just wake up, the skull flies to you and dialog starts. There's no "you see a friendly but somewhat suspicious skull that oddly seems to float around".
It may seem like a small detail, but this permeates Numanuma's writing as a whole. So much of what your read is unnecessary that it gets boring and you get inclined to start skipping text. When you do this, the game dies. There's nothing left.