Thanks for the feedback! Glad to see that you appreciated the jank. This was more or less intentional, as we wanted to rely on the RNG of spawns to stress the player out. There will be times where you absolutely can't survive and you will be hit, but with instant retries, you can try again until you get the dream run for high score.
I will take note of your hold down button. In the future, if this ever continues, I was thinking about adding an upgrade system with the ship. So pressing down and holding to move, and then re-rolling the direction could be one of those upgrades.