View attachment 2101671
While there are good catgirls, I usually like them in spite of their cat-ness rather than the cat-ness being an incentive. That and I've seen a lot of people resort to making catgirls into "generic tsundere brat" or "generic subby waifu" so I just associate that with them now. I also just think they're super played out by now, they're used SO often and are SO homogeneous.
This is why is said it comes down to the quality of the writer or performer. For example I hate the injustice version of Superman, because he's part of a trend of modern writers trying to take characters who typically are your paragon of justice and making them dark, edgy and flawed. Which in my opinion is proof that many modern writers are talentless hacks. As you don't have to do that to inject flaws into the character of the Superman.
For example (I can't remember the name of the comic) but, there is a story-line where Superman and Lois Lane have started dating, and Superman is completely smothering her with attention and being controlling because he does not want her to get hurt. Essentially he's an obsessive overly protective boyfriend. Obviously this is putting a strain on their relationship, as Lois is very headstrong. This parallels his battle with Brainiac in this comic as he is collecting entire civilizations, not only for more information, but to protect them. As Brainiac does not believe any life form can be trusted to make their own decision, as every intelligent life form he has meet always fights over resources, or their beliefs. So to prevent this he just bottles whole entire civilizations. Taking away an ability to make decisions for themselves. This is what Super-Man comes to understand he is doing to Lois. And while he's still afraid, because he has many enemies and the fact that Lois is not super strong like him, he realizes he cannot control every aspect of her life.
Super-Man is still a boy scout, but the writers uses the traits that have already been established with the character create a story where he is challenged and show that even he has flaws. No trope is inherently bad, but it can be used poorly or in an uninteresting way. Which is usually the case, as most series are just copying the shows that were interesting while not understanding why they were great. So, yeah I agree with you a lot of modern cat girls are lame as fuck. Same deal with the standard shonen protagonist, tsundere girl ect. But really comes down to execution in my opinion.