he is the most sneaky of them all and does the most damage, during playtests my friend would wait for some of the meter to build and then just frantically slam the button to kill it before it got a chance to attack them. the knife has an extra feature that's hard to notice in that it's damage ramps up with each hit in a short time window, so if you fill the blue bar up and spam it you can do about 10 damage which is more than 2 gun shots.
I literally dealt with that monster the same way! I was just smashing the spacebar like a madman, hoping to dodge its attack X). As for the knife mechanic, I didn’t know about that, but it’s interesting! I did exactly what you said — I waited for the stamina bar to fill up and then unleashed a thousand cuts on the enemy. But that monster still managed to catch me!