Well, I can only speak from my own experience.
When the PS5 launched I wanted to upgrade but you literally couldn’t get it because it wasn’t in stock anywhere. You could only find it on eBay of some private seller that started at almost double the price, no, thank you. Then Sony introduced this “Register and on the next event you get a slot to buy one from the official Website” which was great. I got invited the first time and literally couldn’t buy it because the website was broken. Whenever I wanted to select my payment method the checkout got blank and there was nothing you could do. Even worse was that you couldn’t hard refresh the shop because this would have killed the session that the website needed to allow you to buy it. So, even switching browsers with the same “invitation link” didn’t work. I reported this to the support, but they didn’t really care. half a year later, I got my second invitation link and the same happened then as well. I reported it again to the support, but they still didn’t know what to do with that information or wanted to troubleshoot this.
And now, there isn’t really a need for it anyway. The Games that I would have wanted to buy on the PS5 released on the PC.
I think the biggest problem that people have with NGE is that it just isn’t your typical shounen anime. All of the characters behave in a way because of their past experiences. Shinji being abandoned by his father, witnessing his mother’s death without actually understanding or realising it, asuka being neglected by her mother and Rei being a clone. And all of them in their teens, in a broken world getting told to fight and probably die or humanity is doomed.
With how saturated anime are with flawed main characters that then use that flaw to their advantage to overcome their enemy, NGE just doesn’t do that.
I think that viewers just expect this hero story when they watch it.
I mean. I had a similar impression when I first watched it a long long time ago and thought that shinji was a wuss. But that was after I watched the typical shounen, DB, DBZ, Naruto and bleach. Not to mention that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. Only later after watching it a second time and digging into the background a bit, shinjis Oedipus complex, asukas hedgehog dilemma and the general motivation of each of the characters it made a lot more sense. Including the context of their situation made me appreciate the storytelling a lot more because it put everything into perspective.