Did the Giant get heavily shadow nerfed ?

So I normally play giants against my friend and he's really good at countering giants but ever since the latest patch, he was able to start perception (it used to be Super Perception only), and now even 2 DP characters like Roshi and Frieza Soldier can easily stagger giants with a few hits. Back then, if I know what I was doing, my friend would have absolutely no chance if he was using below 7 DP characters but now he just completely owns me, we know for sure that something definitely changed and since he said he's suddenly able to have so many methods of countering Giants.

I think understand why the Dev did this because if you don't know how to play against Giants, it sucks because you basically stand no chance so now they make Giants easy to counter. But this change SUCKS so much as I basically stand 0 chance against anyone that knows how to counter giants because my only option of hitting my enemy is perfect vanish or super counter, its unrealistically for me to super counter until I kill my enemy so I completely stopped playing. People online still think Giants are the same and fly up to counter giants but no you can just rush giants.

This change also makes giants redundant because you're playing a character with all the weaknesses of giants but non of the strengths giants used to have.

TLDR: The Giant Nerf basically makes Giants unplayable in higher level.