I don’t think it’s about “everyone”. It’s about production companies picking what’s popular, the currently popular theme, and produces shovelware standard-productions in a narrow, uninspired target-audience checkboxing way. They contract producers and creatives, but restrict them and likely invest so little that it ends up with what it is. The industry as a whole, many titles, end up as forgettable, mediocre, similar shovelware.

Much like Hollywood produced an abundance of hero movies until everyone was sick of it. Or how EA produced the same sports game each year. Or Call of Duty. Or Battlefield.

---

I agree with there being a lot of sub-par and mediocre productions, and the overpowered, harem, and video game elements are big offenders and indicators of what most of the time end up as bad products.

I enjoyed Reincarnated as a vending machine. Simple formula, very forced, but hilariously absurd.

Most overpowered protagonist anime end up between bad and awful. But The Eminence in Shadow makes use of it as poignant satire. And I remember seeing another series where they made it work through enemy hybris, and the punishment/revelation was satisfying enough that it worked, in large part through direction and production quality.

The most “wtf” regarding isekai I recently saw was when the entire series was not about being an isekai, but - not at the begining nor end - they put a random scene in where the protagonist had a vision from modern Japan city and was like “what is this about?” and that was it. Maybe they included it just so it can have the isekai product tag? I have no idea.

---

Coming back to the original theme and hypothosis, the differentiation of and popularity of fantasy vs isekai escapism is interesting.

Ghost in the Shell is certainly fantastical. Enjoying or viewing or getting invested in fantastical stories is inherently partly escapism too. Isekai specifically puts a - most of the time - normal modern human into a fantastical setting though, materializing escapism as a fact on the protagonist.

I’m not sure there’s such a hard line to draw though.