What is it with anime villains and the Hobbesean ideal of our state of nature? I mean, it's like every other bad guy in action anime is motivated by nothing more than "true nature of man is evil, and so society is just a thin layer over it, so let's strip it away with magic and turn everyone evil", completely oblivious to the fact that antisocial behavior only emerges when it is imposed upon from above. I mean, it's a good Aesop, but it's also kind of a "Baby's First Villain Motivation" here -- when you cannot come up with an interesting villain, make them spout Hobbes instead. :-\
The best villains work as foils to your protagonist and help them develop, particularly in a long-running series that doesn't fit into a neat three-act structure. The Freudian approach of, "Oh, my parents smacked me around when I was a kid and now I want to kill every adult," used to be even more popular, but it was pretty hard to execute right, since audiences would either 1) feel legitimately terrible for the villain and realize how privileged a hero with relatively stable parental figures would be, 2) groan at the cliché and point out that bad parents don't make bad people, since half of all heroes in fiction also have terrible childhoods, or 3) go to sleep while the author is busy putting the plot on vacation to talk about the villain's family situation. As the previous poster pointed out, black-and-white ethics don't fare much better unless you're talented enough to double down on the hero-villain moral opposition and make each of them genuinely compelling in their own right, and not everyone can write villains as entertaining in their awfulness as, say, Dio from JJBA.
Having your villains indulge in complex philosophical debate with the heroes isn't always the best strategy, because the surface fascination of things like nihilism and utilitarianism tends to evaporate once you get into the nitty-gritties and start debating logic, metaphysics and the nature of knowledge, perceptions and reality. Philosophy, unlike subjects like history, has a large collection of concepts that are very easy to Google and summarize, so you don't need to do a PhD course in it to get the basics. From thereon out, you put a token moral dilemma to evoke token grey morality and make the audience nod thoughtfully for three seconds before some-or-the-other plot device magically resolves the conflict. Hobbesian philosophy is one of those variants that perfectly contrast the superhero-genre's assumptions of fundamental human virtue, while still being incredibly easy to contradict by going, "Uh, nope, you're just an edgelord, now watch as I channel the power of all the random old ladies I helped cross the street." Basically, it allows you to simulate the semblance of logic so that both the authors and the readers can pretend that thinking was done, which is sufficient enough to tick off the checkboxes of 'three-dimensional antagonist' and 'philosophical conflict' that you'd expect to find in a 21st century action story aimed at young adults.
And of course, considering the amount of people who unironically believe that characters like the Joker or Thanos are tragic villains who did nothing wrong, I'd argue that these massy, pseudo-intellectual philosophies can still come off as legitimately mindblowing to large demographics. So if publishers and the market are willing to support such works, then why would an author ever want to push themselves to do anything legitimately complex or new? Case in point, SHY has a relatable female protagonist, an interesting premise involving national heroes, cute enough character designs and traits to make the cast pop, and enough shades of queerness to stand out in the already-rare genre of Western-influenced superhero manga. It won't be the next OPM or MHA, but it gets decent attention and feels reasonably unique, which is reason enough to give audiences more of what they want (simplistic moral conflicts ending with hugs, tears and an affirmation that Everyone is Capable of Good Things) as opposed to reinventing the wheel.
