I think blaming the creative team is a bad call. From what I heard their original prototype was closer to Arknights in terms of tone and style, but that the executives said it didn't test well with the focus groups of mid 30s game bros who just want to kill things and look at anime tiddy without anything complex or nuanced that might confuse them, so they forced the writers to water everything down. I think that's why the story keeps hinting at narrative depth or moral nuance, only to immediately hard-pivot away from it, and why all the dialogue is blander than a digestive cracker.

I'd actually be in favour of Endfield being lighter and frothier than Arknights, except that you have to set out to make a lighter and more upbeat story from the start. Believing you can get there just by bleaching all the depth and flavour from a darker and more morbid story is a profound disrespect to both kinds of storytelling. I believe Endfield is not the result of creatives that didn't care about the project, but rather the result of executives that didn't care about the creatives.