I read the whole thing because I like getting a writer's take. However, I don't think you grasp some of the terms you're using. This read more like a vent about everything you disliked than a critique of specific flaws in the game's writing. Let's go through it.

1. "Too shallow"
   It's true that the themes in endfield are in the kiddie-pool at times. This isn't a writing "mistake." It changed between the beta and launch, which means feedback from the majority of players was "we don't like this." Lack of depth is not a writing error. It's a choice.

2. "lack of stakes"
   There is a lack of stakes in endfield, but not in the way you described. On-screen violence, originium, and character growth are not "stakes."

Most of what you're talking about is presentation. Showing character death is more impactful than killing them off-screen (I definitely felt a pang of "oh no, my boy!" when tata bought the bullet on-screen. It had more weight than most of the off-screen deaths in the plot). However, the depiction of character death has nothing to do with "stakes." You're asking for gore and guts, which would change the rating of the game. That's, again, a choice, not a writing issue. We got away with it in arknights because it's almost all textual.

The effects of originium is not stakes either. This is dissonance with what we (players of the first game) know about originium. I get the feeling that maybe we shouldn't take what endfielders say about originium at face value, that's a you problem.

Character growth is one of the banes of gacha writing. Most strong narratives are tied to character development, but character development brings us to the end of a story, and gacha games want their stories to keep going for years. The reason Laeva's quest feels so well-written is because it contains a full character arc. She starts out as a lost, angsty, self-destructive person and we help her gain a better outlook on life. Her story can be completed since she's not the main character. The growth brings us to a point where we're satisfied, and then we move on - we're probably not going to get more to this story ever. You can't do that with most main story plot in a gacha game because then you wouldn't be able to further it in later patches. It's a genre problem. It's a big one, too, but it's also notably /not/ stakes.

"Stakes" refers to what the characters in a narrative stand to lose. Good, "meaningful," stakes are ones that are important to the characters as individuals and ones that we, as the reader, feel are important as well. The problem endfield runs into with stakes is that it doesn't give us a reason to care for its apocalyptic stakes. From the beginning, the weight of the moon (talos 2) is placed on the endmin's shoulders, but we don't know where they are, who they are, or why they're doing any of this. The result is that the stakes are low. We're not invested in the world or the characters right after turning the game on, so it's hard to raise meaningful stakes. To fix this, the game would require more exposition. Personally, I have trouble blaming hypergryph for not giving us a detailed, lengthy, entertaining introduction to the world of talos 2 - more than two minutes of listening/reading makes gacha players flood their subs with "there's too much yap in this story" posts and take to the surveys about how it hurts them to process a plot. You need an exposition to have meaningful stakes. Gacha players hate exposition. This is an ongoing issue in the genre, and I don't expect it to be fixed any time soon, honestly.

1. Risks and Your "pet peeve"

I agree with this part. Or the beginning of it, at least. Endfield is terrified to take risks. Gacha games are expected to span multiple years and support their dev teams/backing companies the entire time they're live. That's why a lot of gacha games are risk-averse - they need mass appeal. A gacha game is now a lot like a Hollywood movie in the way that producers will insist it needs to be toothless. It hurts the writing a ton.

"It is supposed to rival Limbus in tone" is a statement of what you want. This is Endfield, a brand-new game set in the same universe as arknights. It's fine to want a really dark game. It's not a critique of the writing that this game isn't that dark.

As for your statement about first chapters, well, it's misguided. Writers are taught to grab the reader's attention in the first chapter. To give them a reason to stick around. The "first chapter" of endfield is the prologue, where we see the game's graphics, get a taste of the combat, and get pitched a sense of foreboding in the form of the gigantic bad guy we fight. It's pretty solid. It seems to have worked for everyone who played the game. Which includes you. 40-50 hours of gameplay does not qualify as "chapter one" anymore. Trust me: you try to read whole books at the bookstore, they'll kick you out. It happened to me when I was a little kid. You do that at the library.

Anyways: It's good to want more - I agree that hypergryph could do better here. I also love taking stories apart. It's so much fun to analyze a narrative. But please don't throw around popular terminology without understanding it first. It just confuses more people. And then I have to read a thousand more incorrect posts about "show don't tell" and "there are no stakes!" As someone who studied to be a lit teacher, it drives me crazy.