Stats stopped being enough when the wuxia and xianxua trend hit worldwide. A lot of LitRPGs are trying to include those elements and they just dont mix. Take Ghosthound for example. Ghosthound was an amazing LitRPG, about a man stuck outside the system carving his own path to power. Then the author turned it into a interdimensional xinxua. At this point, I stopped reading cause the story just wasn't doing it for me anymore. It turned into just another dime a dozen cultivation novel disguised as a LitRPG.
wuxia / xianxia mechanics do not mix well when added to the LitRPG genre, but actually LitRPG mechanics integrate VERY well into a wuxia / xianxia world. Basically, the stats and other LitRPG mechanics become a tracker for how far along you are on your cultivation. So, the fusion of the two only really works if you start your world from the base of being a cultivation world, and then characters have some method of tracking their stat growth. The only concept of levels that might exist is level of cultivation.
An excellent example of this mechanic being used well would be "Warlock of the Magus World." The guy reincarnates from some futuristic earth-like world into a wuxia world where cultivation is used to advance as a mage. He happens to have had a microchip implanted in his brain at the time of his death, and the microchip came with him, fused to his soul. Said microchip can track the Str. Agi. and Vit. of the MC and any living thing around him, with a 1 representing the base standard for an adult male human from the old Earth. The highest stat seen before he decides to change the standard of measurement is in the mid 50s.
This actually brings up a basic weakness of most LitRPGs. They get TOO absorbed in the stats, and therefore wind up in a stats-inflation trap that just gets completely ridiculous and renders stats meaningless in the process. If you are doing it right, 2X the base human average ought to be considered super-human, with 5X whatever you have set as the human average being considered absolutely insane. Most series I've seen seem to use a D&D standard in which 10 is considered the base average, which should mean 50 is insanely powerful, but then they go ahead and have characters with 4 digit or even 6+ digit stats. You've gone completely too far when you get into that nonsense.
Usually, cultivation worlds that pull a few LitRPG mechanics are more conservative with dolling out stat points, where as LitRPG worlds just inflate stats to the sky. I think this observation of how well cultivation worlds handle LitRPG mechanics might have something to do with why a few people decided to try the mixture in reverse. (which ultimately results in an already bad problem becoming worse.)