Your complaints about kratos are actually positives for me and actually the main point of the story.
God of war isn't an edgelords fantasy anymore, the game has matured as kratos has. This type of game is no more safe than the original trilogy was back when the main demographic of games like this thought blood, cursing, breasts and other such things were examples of being adult like.
David jaffe was a visionary but he also largely existed inside a time capsule and the other games just followed that template for a long time after he left. The very definition of safe game design.
The main goal of modern god of war is to change kratos into a legitimately good person who legitimately regrets his past mistakes. Whether or not one likes that is subjective but it's the entire point and they haven't exactly been hiding it since 2018.
They had already done that in the first Nord of War. From what I've played, so far, they seem to have overdone it in this title.
The writing, as a whole, seems less elegant. Characters over explain, both plot and their internal conflicts. Also, all characters, not just Kratos, seem way too goodie-good for a world of back-stabbing, war-ready, nordix gods.
So far I've heard Atreus say "Just trust me" about a hundred times to each characters, most of which have zero reason to trust him or do him any favours, and yet they do. They don't feel like real people. I've been asking myself how nobody has told Atreus to go fuck himself so far. Its pushed the plausibility of the charactes to a point I stopped caring about the story. I'm only slightly curious to see how the plot unfolds, but I don't care about anything because it feels like an assemblage of random events that would never follow from one another if the characters were written like actual people.
Seems partly like a case of putting plot over characters. They set out to have sertain events occur, and then the characters are forsed to go along with the plot regardless if it fits their personality.
I don't know if californians are that soft, but I feel like recently, most games coming from the west cost are going into this direction where every character talks like a school consuler. Maybe that's how the writer thinks ideally suportive friends would interact with each other, but sure as hell isn't how I see actual human beings interact.
Ironically, I felt the same way about TLOU2, but in reverse. The characters were too obsessed with revenge and too no-self-preservation-super-hero-like for a "grounded" post apocalyptic world.
The more "adulty" these video game stories are trying to be, the more the sheltered, under-socialized and lacking in life-experience, their writers are starting to show to be. I think many games are aiming for stuff they lack the subtlety and finesse to execute. Perhaps the old parody-like of Hollywoodian tropes are a safer route.
i'm being overly critical and mean right now, though.