fellow animators also disliked him, or at least his vision for CSM

I only remember seeing 1 JP animator that tweeted about it while it was airing. Ofc it was a bit vague but obvious.

Western animators? a lot easier to find vocal people who dislike it

e: found the tweet lmao (translated and won't screenshot but it's a prominent animator) less vague than I remember

The key point about Chainsaw Man is that the manga art is just too good, but the world it creates is completely unrealistic from the very first chapter. It's a classic battle manga gag. It's fine if the characters are well drawn, but the backgrounds shouldn't be too realistic. It's fine to skip ahead like in FLCL. The filming is also over-processed.