I have to express a hard disagree here. I think the message can be made at higher or lower resolutions, in vague or deep ways, and can comment not just on broad vague themes but in deep ways about specific mechanisms.

The merit and pertinence of the message as radical criticism is going to have everything to do with ground level execution of details, depth of world building, clarity of vision, etc., which will turn out different depending on any particular media.

I do think it's fair to say that most things downwind from Neuromancer can be fairly assessed as tropey, but I think that's a sturgeon's law thing rather than something unique about the genre as distinct from other genres.

It seems like you would have to go pretty far back to find a time where that would be a genuinely radical message. The 19th century saw the trusts and rail barons. There was also the East India Trading Company and its affect on India.

I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd like to), but I always got the sense that humanization and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk and the dystopian world created by corporations was one of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, though.

"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.

Tropes can be sort of like cultural T cells. I'd rather see more "nazis are bad" and cyberpunk stories and less disney shit for this reason alone.

It'll start getting old for me when the risk of it coming true goes away.