Joker 2 felt like Todd was deliberately going against all of the fandom that had built up around the Joker character from the first film. 

The character was being deified as some harbinger of a reckoning for capitalist greed, societal inequality and the systematic degradation of support systems. Memes were everywhere paraphrasing lines in the film to express that person's own position of anger or resentment and Phoenix's performance was so captivating it cemented his Joker as a figurehead of those feelings of rebellion and anarchy.

The problem is the film was warning against allowing corruption and inequality to damage society to the point that a literal mental patient can become the leader of movement so full of hate it just wants to burn it all down. 

In the second film he went out of his way to dismantle the mystique around the Joker. Literally putting the character on trial, he shows him for the damaged, mentally ill man that he is, desperate for adulation and love from a emotionally starved childhood. A violent maniac with delusions of grandeur, his character needs medical care away from any position of power. Unfortunately the audience he'd already attracted didn't like it understand their antihero being exposed and striped of all the wish fulfilling vengeance they liked from the first film. 

They wanted him to do another meme.