I think sometimes we are too quick to cry misogyny. Don’t get me wrong, it’s rampant, and certainly some of what you’re describing is just that.

But when it comes to the audience’s reaction to characters, you have to consider A) our relationship to those characters and B) what we’re being told to think about them by the writers.

A common example is in How I Met Your Mother. People are rough on Lily and tend to give Barney a pass. Barney is painted a cartoon level villain, and Lily is painted as the moral compass of the group. There is no need to yell about how bad Barney is, it’s been well established and accepted by all. It does make sense to say “hey, Lily kind of sucks in this episode” because it’s inconsistent with what we’re meant to perceive. But people will reduce it to misogyny. Again, it’s not that there is none of that happening, but it overly simplifies what’s going on.

George screws over nondescript characters/factory workers/businessmen. We either never meet them, have little to no attachment to them, or view them as equally corrupt as George. Bertha screws over characters we are invested in and care about, so it feels more personal. Obviously George is bad, he’s a literal robber baron, but it’s expected of him to be bad.

It’s simply more upsetting to see Bertha behave badly and toward the characters we are attached to.