How, exactly, did he go from being the most beloved person on Yea Forums to the most reviled?

EVA is star wars
Gundam is star trek

I think the strand mechanic/gimmick makes sense as a "genre" and new games will use it, like imagine playing minecraft and everytime you generate a set of chunks there's a probability of it being someone's else's chunk with another's player structure like a house with loot in it, it would make MC so much more interesting to explore here as now there's a set of predefined structures