I feel like this comment is focusing entirely on the aesthetic qualities of -punk cultures. In cyberpunk's heyday it was tacitly understood that the genre was about abuse and loss of power incentivized by the accessibility of incredible technologies, but today it has a more pop veneer of shiny holograms and cyborg badassery. Steampunk seems to focus entirely on what-if worldbuilding at the expense of developing critiques on say rapid modernization in the industrial era. I am not so familiar with mesopunk but I have a feeling it's about more than just slice-of-life narratives in a particular setting.