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Agreed, but writers should think about why they're adding these "shades of grey."
Like, if I go to a bakery and buy sugar cookies, I expect them to taste sweet. Sweet tastes good. Perhaps it might be interesting, sometimes, to dump in chili pepper or coffee grounds or whatever and "subvert expectations" with complex flavors. But unless you really know what you're doing, it mostly just tastes bad.
JRR Tolkien was not a stupid man. He fought in WW1, and was well familiar with the horrors of war against a morally complex foe. But he still used orcs as a simple, pure evil, because that gave him the space to focus on other elements of the human condition. Saying "well what if the orcs arent pure evil" would overwhelm the rest of the story.
I actually had that happen in a DnD game once, sorta. We were being attacked by bandits, and knocked them unconscious. We were lawful good, so we couldnt just execute them. It basically turned the rest of the campaign into a boring slog as we ran a prison camp to try to keep these stupid NPCs alive, instead of doing any fun adventuring stuff. If I wanted to hear a story about the human nature in prison, there are other, better places for that.
Bad GM. Should discuss player expectations. In most pseudo-medieval D&Dish settings, executing bandits is a perfectly Lawful Good thing to do.
Which ties back to the point above. You are right, people don't want to see the Federation turned into a fascist dystopia, they don't want to see Aragorn called a genocider, they don't want the Jedi turned into a corrupt space Nazis. The problem with the new shows is not that they are too gray, it's that the writers don't think about why they're "subverting" the narrative. (Or worse, they do, and it's malicious.)
I think to me it's about- what is the focus of these stories? because we don't have infinite time and attention span. Executing bandits would be fucked up if that were real life, but in a story it's just a minor thing you do to move on to the more interesting parts. Having a simple, cartoonish villain like the original Darth Vader allows for an operatic story where you can enjoy the heroes being awesome and explore the other parts of the world. It would just slow things down if the original Star Wars spent an hour discussing his traumatic past and how he's really not such a bad guy after all. If that stuff is actually interesting (debatable) it can go in its own, separate movie (the prequels).
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