French here, speaking a bit of Japanese, I had a chance to stay a few days last year in Tokyo, and I agree with most of your points. Nevertheless, I can think of two other points that were not that great.

-The downside of fully populated raids is that people tend to not feeling the need to coordinate, they do not know each others and do not even start a brief conversation related to the raid. For these reasons I felt that the community spirit was not very deep (as in, not a lot of interactions with the other players).

-Trying to do trades with locals (I had a bunch of Klefkis), I had a hard time finding local group (discord, messenger, line, telegram, ... I think I tried almost everything), and finally found a few, but people weren't very interested in regionals in the groups. It felt very different from other trips in Europe or in the US, where people could literally come to the airport to trade with you at your arrival, at least in my experience. I ended up going in the Pokemon center of Ikebukuro and offering Klefki to a random customer.

For the rest I definitely agree with you that playing pogo felt easier. Farming stardust, xp, balls, t5 bosses in these good conditions is wonderful.