Him and Busquets can't play the same role essentially. Except he's not a Busquets replacement as defensively he's not on that level. So he's pushed higher which isn't his strength. Barca would need to get a more defensive player to sit in front or next to him, with Frenkie being the deep lying playmaker behind the others. Might work with Kessie.
I don't agree. Frenkie is better than Busquets, also defenisvely. Frenkie is underrated defensively. He is quite fast and his tackling is good as well. He's no Kante or Makelele of course, but he is good in ball recovering. He is not the tallest, but he's quite good in timing aerial duals. I'd say the only thing Busquets has over De Jong is pure physical strenght, but that's about the only thing.
Barcelona just has not been able to say goodbye to Busquets yet. He's the last guy standing, along with Alba, of the golden generation. They don't want to say goodbye to that and Xavi doesn't want to pull the trigger on his old teammate. It's clear if you have to choose between Busquets and De Jong you should choose De Jong any day of the week. The mistake is that De Jong is pushed to another role in order to leave room for Busquets in the team, but in this other role De Jong is just not going to be as impactful and he's going to be much more inconsistant and that's what we've seen at Barcelona.
As other have mentioned in the past few pages of this thread, De Jong is one of (probably the) best press resistant players there is. He's so comfortable on the ball and almost impossible to press. That's why he also usualliy flourishes in big games, because the better teams are more likely to press. However in the games against the smaller teams he's going to be less effective as those teams are less likely to play pressing. He'll just keep the ball in the team and needs others to do the creative part in the attacking end of the pitch because that's not his quality. However as he's mentioned himself today after the match; he needs to be the first player to get the ball in build up, because then he can control the game and the pace of the game. That's what's not happening in Barcelona and happens much more often in the Netherlands team as well as back at Ajax.