It's not overrated, it's legitimately one of the best games in the genre. It was very common for games of that generation to not feature saving, especially platformers which are actually only about an hour or two long. If you could save, you'd breeze through the game at a pace that makes the game almost not worth buying due to (what we would consider by today's standards) a lack of content.
The shoe power up thing is barely a legitimate bad point so I don't really have a response to that lol.