My personal favorite for flawed reasons is Madoka because I was there for the live reactions to the infamous episode and it was magical watching everyone lose their shit. It was also my re-introduction to anime after being shamed out of it for liking sailor moon as a kid.
I think a lot of the "Eva is deconstruction of the mecha genre" discourse is due to the limited amount of mecha anime that was easily accessible at the time it initially got popular outside of Japan. People would have seen, like, Gundam Wing (lol), original Gundam, Robotech, and maybe bits of pieces of random things (I distinctly remember seeing a few episodes of old Tetsujin #28 as "Gigantor").
Now we have easy access to all the deep cuts and can see it has always been sad boys with parental issues forced into the robot (at least as long as Tomino has been around).