They've definitely improved from what I keep seeing from MK11. I grew up with MK games, but then I grew out of them for a bit in favor of Street Fighter and SNK fighters. But I've come back after the hiatus.
MK11 to me definitely looks like the most visually appealing fighting game in a long time.(Yes, more so than Fighterz, I said it.) Honestly a lot of them are kind of ugly. Not to say that NRS games looked so pretty before, MK9 and especially Injustice look very dated. MKX is an improvement, but it still has problems that stick out like the female bodies being way too skinny looking and some of the animations being off. Injustice 2 looks pretty great, but again some of the characters are weirdly animated in combat.
MK11 so far has fixed a lot of my gripes before. The female ninjas don't dress like strippers(And yes, I know people are sad about that.), no running which I like even though I got used to it for combos(Which was really annoying at first), and the meta just seems more strategic than MKX was. MKX being almost pure rushdown and long *** combos.
It came from Steamdb, so it could only be fake if the devs deliberately put out a red herring. Which so far doesn't seem to be the case. Johnny is definitely in. Geras is in and he's not on the list either. Same likely goes for Kitana and Kung Lao. Also the three mystery names are pretty much up in the air for what they even are.