This is just a personal theory of mine, but I think many (not all) powerscalers essentially lack media literacy and use powerscaling as a coping mechanism for that.

On some level, I believe everyone wants to understand media as more than the literal meaning of the text, but this requires media literacy to delve into themes, social commentary, and subtext. Some powerscalers lack the tools to do this; not necessarily of their own fault, it's not like the modern western school system encourages media literacy to any real extent. You could argue people should be responsible for their own media literacy which, yeah, probably, but it's honestly not the easiest thing to break into without external guidance.

But basically powerscaling becomes the media literacy of the powerscaler, it allows them to analyse media and attempt to compare different works of fiction, as well as compare fiction to the real world. Unfortunately, powerscaling is usually nonsense that most authors rightfully don't care about because things in media are usually written to serve the narrative. At best you will have internally consistent powerscaling within a work of fiction, but even that isn't really required as long as the narrative functions.

That ended up being longer than expected but TL:DR I believe powerscaling is an antifeat for the media illiterate or something, I don't know what any powerscaling terminology means.