Did we even watch the same demo?

The early part of the scene is Noctis on his own, the quest objective is for "Noctis to survive until his comrades show up," which they do throughout the course of the encounter (starting at 1:22). Also you can see Noctis taking damage everytime Matt failed at dodge rolling Titan's attacks (for example at 1:06-1:08, 1:30 etc). At 2:42 we even see control switching to input a command for Gladio when the quest objective updates to "Destroy Titan's Arm."

All in all we saw, the dodge rolling in action, companion commands, Blizzara and a QTE - I think it was a pretty good demo marred only by the show director constantly panning to crowd shots.

I agree that the in-game camera was a bit finnicky at times though, I suspect it's due to being locked onto Titan instead of free. The Iron Giant encounter in the Platinum Demo had a similar problem.