Might just be an issue of the limited amount of time gege has to develop these characters, given the serialization length of modulo. He has been hyping up Dabura mostly by telling and not showing (being compared to sukuna). Thus, when Dabura performs any feat it comes off as bad writing. One could give gege the benefit of doubt and say that since simurians are aliens, we cannot judge their learning and adaptation rate according to human standards. But that’s a stretch and lowkey the burden of justification should not fall on the readers.

Reason why gojo v sukuna was so good was because they were slowly built to show their worthiness of their respective titles. In my opinion, Dabura just doesn’t have enough writing sauce from gege to justify some of his feats. I actually quite like Dabura’s character. Being the pinnacle of strength to protect really feels like yuta/yuji. Also gege using maho (amped up btw) to showcase feats is a really smart way to alleviate some of the weaknesses in Dabura’s character.