After venturing back into the world of the working and / or socializing I can tell you with complete certainty that everything would be much better if we all got goop't.
Literally everyone I interact with feels like they don't have the bandwidth to properly explain anything. I don't know if this is a late capitalism thing where everyone is exhausted and on edge or if I'm just getting weirder as I get old.
Shoutouts to all my painfully awkward comrades trying to make it out there in the real world.
When I learned about the ending I had my usual crisis with Evangelion and needed to read through a shitload of reviews and forum posts and literal Hegel in order to deal with it. EoE makes me lose my mind and need to watch hours of philosophy to find meaning in it any time I think about it, but I come away better for it. Rebuild just feels hollow. Like let's remove the struggle and message about self-actualizing and accepting/finding beauty in a flawed world, and instead make a "perfect" end for everyone that means little, and create a new girl who exists to be a "reward" for Shinji's imagined character-arc.
That happy ending is somehow less happy than a literal apocalypse, and the main couple strangling one and calling the other disgusting. That was legit life-affirming