It never made the character evolve or anything, it was just to make other teen girls reply with "OMG IM CRYING SO MUCH RIGHT NOW" and get likes and reblogs.
Back when I used to hang in fanfiction circles, we called this "the Angst Fic" and I generally hated them, because yeah they were pointless: Bad thing happens to character we like just to get a reaction. It wasn't deep or meaningful, it was cheap and manipulative.
Those 22-episode seasons had room for all that wonderful filler that made characters feel real but now everything's stripped down to just plot plot plot.
Back in the days of Usenet I recall having western animation vs anime discussions (some things never change, I guess) and back then it was almost universally seen as a positive for a show to have one continuous story.
I recall being one of the outliers, because one of the benefits of the episodic structure of shows like
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was that characters had depth, precisely because you could explore them in a bunch of weird and unusual situations. If the show was one continuous story, then suddenly the episode where Teela and Evil-Lyn are forced to survive together in the desert can't happen, nor can the episode where they meet a good Skeletor from an alternate timeline, or any of the other amazing ideas they pulled.
There was another problem, too: with a lot of anime I can't revisit them because you can't just put in your favorite episode and go from there, its either all or nothing. I've often said this is why I stuck with Detective Conan--its structure means I can just put on a mystery, have fun, and then walk away when I'm done, and if I want more, its my choice, while something more serialized almost feels like its twisting my arm to continue.
Not only that, but if I forget a plot point in Conan's rare story episodes (which isn't likely as the show loves to recap for the sake of those in the cheap seats), its easy to go back and watch the relevant episodes. Meanwhile, the last time I tried to play Final Fantasy VIII, I got to the end of Disc 2, stopped caring, and then when I finally resumed several months later... I couldn't remember what was going on. So now I was looking at the prospect of replaying the entire game from scratch, and I just decided it wasn't worth it. (And yes, I know comparing a game to an anime is apples-and-oranges, but my point is the same would apply to an anime with a serialized story under similar circumstances).
On the subject of everything being the same and "safe" topics, a lot of modern media seems to have to real life analogies. Villains, who don't get tragic backstories because they are writer's pet, are made act like Mustache/Orange Man or a hate group (complete with matching baseball caps of a certain color and anagram) is made to be like (only) white supremacy groups.
Even before they became political, one of the quickest ways to make a villain boring for me was to make them the Nazis (either the literal thing or some sort of fictional stand-in).
Cuz I mean, the worst kind of villain is the kind who are evil for the sake of being evil. And yet that's basically what Nazis are in fiction--which of course leads to the same shit I was complaining about earlier about "safe" messaging. It's literally the "deep, thematic" equivalent of saying "I hate bad things."
Likewise I tend to see it as ultimate hackery when they're invoked as a backstory element, except in cases where it would make sense. For example, Magneto being a holocaust survivor is fine with me, but I always disliked the implication in the Outlast horror games that all the weird paranormal experiments began as Nazi research that somehow kept going into the modern day. It felt like bullshit.
