Yes, they are not useless in 1on1 and you can be successful with them. But the longer the game goes, the more boring they become. They also are still very buggy and have no real identity. Inspiration for army is annoying to use and really not good the way it works. On top of that it is still bugged, but not as bad as it was in the beta. Prelates still bug out and will never be able to inspire anymore. It just happens much less frequent than in the stress test. A few tooltips are wrong or not complete (the Prelate inspiration tooltip says it gives +5 armor, the twohander tech only says it gives +2 damage, but it also gives +15 hp. That was also true for the beta, so the twohander tech was not really improved, the tooltip just never was accurate). The mace upgrade still suffers from -3 damage when combined with twohander. It is supposed to give +6 vs heavy armor, but with twohander it goes down to +3. This cannot be intended, as no tech in this game makes another tech worse. They fixed the attackspeed bug, but not the mace damage bug.
The Landsknecht also is way too weak. He was not improved since beta and can only be thrown into the army for some effect, when you are floating gold already and can pump units out, because ressources are not an issue anymore. When gold is still valuable (which is the case for 90% of the game), the Landsknecht is not a unit you can build and feel good about it. He dies too quickly and to everything.
And the HRE still doesn’t have a coat of arms. There are two slim lines on their shields, but other than that it is empty. The shields of all the other civs look way cooler and also have coats of arms.
Sometimes the shield also gets twisted around, but that usually fixes itself after a while. This is not a HRE only bugy, but a knights and I think MAA bug. Noticed it only for knights in the released game, tho.
The early game of the HRE is strong and they can put in quite a lot of work, but the civ still feels unfinished, is buggy, lacking in mechanics and doesn’t have a real indentity. A tech that improves the sturdiness of knights (more armor, more hp) would make them a bit more HREesque. And a tech that allows inspiration for military units to actually be useful is also needed. Right now Prelates only heal when in combat and barely ever inspire. They also only inspire one unit, so it’s actually pretty damn bad. The mechanic behind it just is lacking and offers almost no synergies. It is okay for ranged units and artillery, but it still feels dull and inferior to Rus and Abbasid (camel aura applies to everything just because the camel is present).
You can also check the HRE Bug thread I opened. There I try to list up everything I find that is off for the HRE. Esp. bugs, but I tend to always go into mechanics and techs as well. ._.