Additionally, if the player is crouched down and you aim straight forward while standing in front of them, your attack will still land despite it missing visually.

skill issue

Hello Geez. Am I correct in assuming that this fix is currently inside the 1.20 stable update? If that's the case, I am able to recreate the bug using the same steps in this bug report in a offline version of the game. This fix is also not mentioned in the stable release notes.

From my previous experience, this issue with stamina started occurring with the release of the 1.19 update. It happens most often on servers with latency issues and was impossible to reproduce on a offline version of the game. If I had to guess, the introduction to inertia made it so that some melee attacks are not registered based on the state in which you are moving.

It is worth noting that this issue only occurs on servers and cannot be reproduced on a offline version of DayZ.
This report is also very similar to https://feedback.bistudio.com/T167632

Hello, this issue has been fixed with the 1.19 experimental update with regards to the fix against targeting cars with melee (https://feedback.bistudio.com/T165925).