The changes on the game was not affected by nexon position as publisher.
Itos published by imc itself and we see almost the same marketing decisions made for ktos.
What changes the game was their involvement in development.
Nexon have big share in imc games since like 2017 and without no doubt they have their men involved in imc games to shaping ktos which is one of the biggest culprit to the game failure
To make it worse Ktos is pretty much every tos base game, so anything made for Ktos will likely come to itos including the bad decisions.
So, even if they stop publishing ktos, most likely they won’t stop take parts in shaping the game.
Unless nexon sell their shares (tho i doubt they will benefit from it, cause it was basically bad investment move), nexon stop snooping around tos development, we may see another changes of development path
Although, it’s still very unlikely that it will bring game any good given the game reaching it’s end of lifetime state where most of latest development path being made is just to milk quick money with little to no improvement and substantial content. It was mostly just gimmick updates, cute costumes, gacha, and probably 10% of real goodies out of em all.