in neutral, you have to throw out guaranteed hits or mindgame your opponent in order to land a combo starter. you have to be careful if you want to get the upper hand. that's just kinda how fighting games work. if there were too many neutral-breaking tools, the player who attacks the fastest would win every time (think Call of Duty), making it a different game entirely.
the problem is you don't have to carefully get an upper hand, all you have to do is
not attack or get the other guy to try and parry a feint without them also feinting once they see your feint.
i don't know how high "skill" the game thinks you're at, but in whatever "rank" i'm in it's impossible to get a chain off, guardbreak, or even use stunning tap since i mainly use the raider. even doing the built-in heavy into stunning tap mixup is pretty much useless since nobody falls for it more than once
the game just devolves into me / the opponent screwing up a parry, trading a hit, or missing a counter-guardbreak. the only reason i can do cool chains anymore is because the game's matchmaking for skill switched to extended and gave me a person that's a lot lower "rank", or alternatively somebody can only do a cool chain to me because it gave me somebody that's a lot higher "rank" or just has way better reactions than i do
tl;dr basically to hit the other guy they just have to make a mistake rather than you have to do some cool chain or do cool mindgames