I am probably mansplaining something to you, but there is a difference between cf midsoled shoes and minimalist shoes, and its not what you may think.
Minimalistic shoes are basically 0 offset shoes with the least amount of cushoning as possible. Thins Vibram 5 toes (why fingers here and not toes?) or similar shoes. The idea was to give the feeling of running almost barefoot. BUT, at some point the industry started shifting.
There were a ton of injuries related to the so called minimalistic shoes (mostly no padding 0 offset) so the industry slowly went back to start adding some more padding with low offsets. People suddenly started using shoes that were meant to run 5k (almost no padding with very small offsets) to run marathons. Think of the Adidas racing flat lines. For all intend and purposes they were minimalistic shoes. But people didnt realize that racing flats were super common years ago for shorter races, specially in Japan.
The Nike came up with the CF plate and VERY soft midsoles. They basically took the flat idea (very small offset) and added a shit ton of padding and cf plates.
Anyway…long way to say… Minimalistic shoes are shoes that mostly have no padding and no offset.
CF shoes have low offsets and a lot of padding.
I dont think the problem is necessarily the shoes, or the CF, but the way the specific low offset shoe makes you run.
The lower the offset, the more you need to run on your toes. If you dont do that, you may risk injuries. And that why we dont have many minimalistic running shoes any more.
that was a lot of rambling…probably very incoherent.