Randomly walked past a couple of Trauma Team guys talking about how they needed to get new brain monitoring implants or lose their job with one guy being like "this is fucked" and the other going "well I have nothing to hide." The setting being a dystopia is fine if you're primed to look at it but otherwise it's just sorta going to get missed.

A lot of the cyber-psychosis missions do that as well.

Some guy went nuts because a corp sold him a mech shop but nothing in it, so he had to sell the shop to the corp at a loss so they could 'evaluate the tools in it', then buy it back at like 3x the price

Some actress went insane because she was actually poisoned as part of a tv show then had a ton of implants stuck in her when she was unconscious

A man lost his mind because the hacks who sold him some implants didn't give him medication to treat the early stages of psychosis but instead decided they were going to try and chop him up and sell his parts

They do a good job of coloring in what an ancap hellworld it is

I think that's why I like CP2077 despite its many flaws: the flavor. It's not the best or most original cyberpunk world out there, but it is definitely the most sharply tongue-in-cheek. I've talked about the bleakness before but I think the appeal lies in how it's so absurdly bleak that it comes back around to being funny in a fucked up way. Of course the powers that be in America would rather make most Americans eat literal kibble like dogs, so that most remaining farming infrastructure can be devoted to the gene-engineered wheat they use to make the treated ethanol fuel for gas-guzzling cars. And of course its name, CHOOH2, is just a marketing gimmick and the actual chemical compound is both proprietary and far worse for the environment than standard ethanol is. It just piles on this absurdity and plays it completely deadpan, and it spits out broken people who are incapable of analyzing the hell that they're in. All they can aspire to is being remembered after they die horribly. Most people don't even get that.

It's a shame they don't even try to make hopeful stories out of it. The best anyone gets out of the entire IP is probably Lucy, who achieves her dream of going to the Moon thanks to David. Sure, David was definitely right about it being a bleak as fuck labor camp and she's probably going to get vented into space in her sleep as collateral damage on a cyberattack, but she did the thing! Alternatively, if you go the Don't Fear the Reaper route for the ending, where V solos his way into Arasaka HQ and fucks it up so badly he effectively acts as an accomplice to Yorinobu's deliberate efforts to destroy the company. There's a newscast in the ending that talks about how shitty Arasaka is doing and how the other corps are eating their lunch. Then V goes to space, achieving his goal of being a high-roller merc and completely failing to grow as a person throughout his entire story.

I That's why I didn't watch it. I heard the ending was pretty bleak and was just like "nope, don't need that".

In Johnny Mnemonic has an austere but ultimately happyish ending. Same deal with Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Neuromancer. A lot of the classics of the canon end with a lot of people dead, but the heroes are better off in so far as they can be. The Matrix? Happy ending, mostly. GiTS? Section 9 usually sorta wins. A lot of PKD stories are pretty grim but not all of them. Deus Ex ends with hope for a better world. Mirror's Edge. EYE's ending is very complicated but not entirely hopeless.

Cyberpunk is often misunderstood as pessimistic or negative, but what it really was, mostly, was a warning about capitalism, technology, futureshock, and the alienation of contemporary and rapidly emerging life in the 80s and 90s.

I'm just not a fan of stories that are so bleak and hopeless.

I can handle a grim story if there's something to cling to and something at least cathartic if not triumphant at the end. Self-described "mature" consumers may smugpost against that, but considering that it's entertainment, and it's fiction, there is no real reason to binge-consume "everything is shit in shit world and the people are made of walking shit and shit on each other" fiction for me unless I wanted to performatively please "mature" consumers, and I don't.