I was more going for: with Tobey Macguire's Spiderman, Doctor Octopus was holding Aunt May from a building and taunting Spiderman with dropping her; the world was not at stake, the city was not at stake, almost nobody else in the city knows or cares who she is. I didn't think Spiderman would lose, but I felt like it mattered and that it was in some way difficult for Peter Parker to deal with, he had to take a chance, risk something, "only just" caught her. CGI tentacles didn't look realistic because they aren't a real thing, and that wasn't a dealbreaker. Nowadays a cloud opens up into an interdimensional portal and a flood of metal-living-skeleton-alien invasion spaceships fly through and it couldn't matter less if it tried; they are a swarm of whocares for the Avengers to punch through, which they do easily and uninterestingly and they didn't miss out on anything happening really. CGI isn't ruining it, bad plot is ruining it. Building turns to dust as thing crashes and explodes, is so overdone that's not even interesting by itself.
Compare to early Hulk who was on his knees in a field against two(!) sonic beam tanks owned by the US Army, with only Banner's love of Liv Tyler to make him stand up and fight. Small scale and he was never going to lose, but this was the US Army against the unknown, Banner and the General's daughter, and it mattered. When Hulk threw the tanks, they were CGI and a bit unrealistic, but so what, that isn't immersion breaking. Watching Hulk fight now is like seeing Star Trek's Lt Worf punch a Romulan spaceship while it explodes over The Fonz jumping a shark on a surfboard. It's not the CGI which makes it bad.
On the YouTube Pitch Meetings channel, one of the recurring jokes critiquing films is the 'writer' describing the plot of a film and getting to a point where a character dies, and the 'executive' does a "who was that? Should I care, because I don't feel anything right now" reply. I don't need the hero to lose, or the CGI to be unnoticable. I want to feel like something is at stake which matters. CGI punchups may as well be watching a 2 hr demo of Street Fighter II.
Every Frame a Painting has a good video on Kurosawa's use of movement in his films, and actually uses The Avengers as a contrasting example and how the cinematography & direction makes the scene in question feel meaningless.[1]
So I agree that it's not the CGI that's the problem. It's the writing, the direction, the cinematography, the editing, the music[2] (though they improved since the linked video came out, directly in response to it), etc. The films are bad in many ways, but the CGI isn't really one of them.
Where can you possibly go from here?
I'd argue the plot of one punch man is about as predictable as it gets, (it's basically a series of boss arcs where side characters struggle and Saitama saves the day but somehow doesn't get the credit). Notably, Saitama has just about zero character development throughout the series. What makes it interesting is the comical relief provided by the constant social commentary on the notion of "strength = recognition".
Interestingly, among superhero movie fans, it is often said that DC movies are worse than Marvel movies, because DC movies lack character development. Infinity war notoriously doesn't even have a happy ending. So I think saying that american superhero movies lack substance isn't necessarily accurate.
[0] https://www.looper.com/img/gallery/the-untold-truth-of-one-p...
The point of the series is that you can take such an uninteresting overpowered character, in a superheroes vs supervillains setting, and still end up with an interesting plot. Of course none of the plot hinges on the question of whether Saitama will be powerful enough to win, that'd be stupidly bad writing.
Mainstream US superhero movies are mostly plots about whether their equivalent of Saitama will win. The action & graphics are the point, the plot is an afterthought.