Its generic slop by anime standards. Like yeah anime is meant for teenagers and young adults so you can’t be too critical over fanservice or flat YA novel Gary sue tier character writing or forgetting to write an actually compelling reason for the villain doing the bad thing at the start by the time the story wraps up. But you can at least try you know?

Anime in general is not meant to be high art but SAO goes the extra mile to be uninteresting bland slop that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Young nerdy teenage boys dont care because all they want is the hot anime girl harem and flashy epic gamer op superpower eye candy sakuga battles but the older you get the more apparent the poor writing gets.

The isekai genre has done a lot better over the decade since SAO initially released things like rezero or even Overlord blow it out of the water in terms of actually interesting plot and suspense. The only reason SAO is still popular is the high quality porn.