I always like Freya as a character, no matter how her character changed: she is strong, complex, and has a voice that is distinctly her own -- even if the player, and perhaps especially if the player, disagrees with that voice. That is what being a character is: regardless of your personal feelings, they have their own volition in the story arc, and they can do as they please so long as there's a reasonable, logical path the viewer can follow to see how they came to those decisions (and hell, maybe in some cases even when the player *can't* see those things).
At the end of the game, I strongly fucking disagreed with Freya's decision-making, I didn't think she should be cold to Kratos for wanting to stop an endless cycle of bloodshed (that he himself had contributed to), and lets face it: Baldr is a bad dude and we like it when bad dudes get what is coming to them. Her interaction with him, though, was an honest if heart-wrenching contribution to what Freya's character is; I don't like it or agree with it, but I understand it, and that's what made her a complex entity in my estimation.
People are free to disagree I suppose, and the conversation actually HAS been alive since long before Abby brought it up on the Giantbomb podcast (articles were written about it), but I think that God of War is a victim of circumstance and proximity in this regard: it has been so fruitlessly mean to its female characters in the past that when it actually treats them with respect and gives them complex characters art, we can barely tell the difference. But there is one.
Oh yeah, and as for the mother: God of War 2018 is partially a game about being a single father. You can hate that it is that, or think that such a thing shouldn't exist in an industry that doesn't make many games about being a single mother, but that's going to mean that the SO is out of the picture. As many have stated, though, she is still very much a character, and very alive in the storytelling -- especially at the end, the great payoff of the story arc. It may suck that you haven't really seen her, but you can't say that by the end of the game you don't know her. And that's the difference between fridging and good storytelling, imo.
In short, no, I don't think God of War (2018) has problematic treatment of women. I think every OTHER God of War game, though, does, and it's that history and expectation that God of War will do something shitty to its women characters that I think bears conversations such as these. I don't think the conversations are bad, and we're having them, but I do think that an inordinate amount of time has been spent beating on the reformed *because* as an industry and as a community we never faced up to just how bad the GoW series really was in the past. But that's just my opinion.