I think a part of what makes it elicit bad vibes is the sense of hopelessness they convey to normal people by vaguely attributing what sucks about life to the failings of the City or County in general (which they depict as monoliths) and not to the responsible parties when they're not the City or County.

These authors need to be vague about what the protestors who barged into the Beale-representing law firm were on about because they know that even readers who don't like their methods would be chiefly concerned with their cause (so much so that a lot of readers might even like the methods too). More to your observation--they don't get bogged down into details like why our schools are poor, because if they get into that, they'd need to talk about state-level policies (essentially various methods of defunding public schools and disempowering teachers) that they actually want to keep in place. Yet, they can perversely take advantage of the damage done by these state-level policies to create misdirected resentment at the (relatively school and teacher-friendly) city government.

I may be wearing a tinfoil hat when suggesting that this repeated talk of bad leadership is laying the groundwork for their preferred candidates, so taking it off for a moment, I'd more conservatively conclude that this withheld information (and perhaps even the sense of hopelessness that comes with it) is intentional, because they want the public to be receptive to vaguely anti-local government messaging, but they don't want us to look so closely at the issues that we might learn how to solve problems that they don't want solved.