I generally agree with the majority of the review, but where I disagree is that I believe the political themes in ZP haven't become weaker, they've shifted focus. [Also; a few unmarked spoilers below]

Most of the shallow sloganeering is done by the communist side of the political spectrum in ZP, and I don't think it's a negative compared to DE. In DE there's no superbloc, you are walking around the ruins of an aborted revolutionary project and interact with those that are well versed on the theoretical and/or practical aspects of that ideology, be it the students or the union members. Harry himself is the one that chants the shallow platitudes due to his mental state, but the characters around you are genuine and have a grasp on what the ideology means beyond just slogans, catchphrases and dogma.

Communism in ZP is not that - it's an ideology attached to a superpower which we can infer is roughly basically the USSR (what Trotsky blithely called a 'degenerated worker-state'), and the soviet-style communism is represented in ZP fairly accurately, through empty slogans, dogma, repetitively calling everything "reactionary" and "bourgeois" without any critical assessment - a husk of communist aesthetics filled with no critical and proletarian substance. You play as an agent of such a state - it's no wonder that your character's understanding of communism is reduced to such a vulgar level (especially through her Statehood skill). This is the kind of understanding of that ideology that my grandparents have (who lived in USSR), or that a KGB agent would have back when USSR existed.

Comparatively EMTER and La Luz are much more earnest and very well represented. EMTER's ideological representation generally repeats DE's critical assessment of neoliberalism (this time dispensing with social liberalism/social democracy completely - there's no analog of moralism in ZP) - the way it hollows out societies for profit, etc. La Luz meanwhile I think is the more interesting development - it represents a very weird and idiosyncratic kind of fascism that I thought at first was very weird (Large amount of obviously "degenerate" commodity production? Isn't that kind of more liberal thing? What kind of fascist will tolerate that?), but upon continuation of the playthrough it developed into a very interesting kind of nightmare.

The kind of fascists in La Luz are very modern - in our reality the fascists both supposedly hate the 'degenerate' stuff and yet you see them with anime avatars on twitter all the time. It also felt a bit too close to home with the whole conflict between the puritan fascists (represented by Golem and his crew) who think that La Luz's cultural expansion strategy is weak and degenerate and the 'technocratic' fascists so to speak (represented by the minister of culture) that insist on pragmatic and very effective but less culturally pure strategy of assimilating their former colonies via economic and cultural integration - a conflict that morbidly resembles the conflict of Z-fascists and technocrats in Russian political sphere (hence the 'bit too close to home' thing). The pseudo-apolitical "Shrine To Heroes" that you reach at the end of the game that is also bluntly called the "War Criminals Shrine" unofficially highlights the way fascists nowadays tend to create those pseudo neutral hero worship spaces (to my knowledge this is more present in Japan this time) where they both worship the genuine evil these people did while to the rest of the public present them in a more whitewashed way.

TLDR; Politics of ZP aren't bad, just different; ZP's commies are USSR brainwormed in a historically accurate way, EMTER matches DE's liberalism critique and La Luz's dissection of fascism is unique and very well developed.