it's incredibly difficult to write a story with characters that make reasonable and empathetic decisions without it being boring

Nah, not exactly. Yeah ever story needs some conflict or adversity to overcome, but if the characters are healthy and empathetic then the conflict has to be external. But that doesn't work so well for shows that revolve around a small set of insular characters and their at-home relationships. External conflict fits better with adventure stories and crime solving and whatnot.

Dunbing people down into tropes makes it cheap and easy to crank out episode after episode after episode.

Yeah for sure. TVTropes.com has ruined so much of this for me lol (warning if you're not familiar, it's a worse timesink than Wikipedia)

It's also a little scary in retrospect that a lot of the men can be used very clearly to demonstrate what undiagnosed, untreated neurodivergence looks like. Looking at this fucking retard with executive function problems! Isn't he a shithead? He's so lucky that this woman with undiagnosed, untreated neurodivergence manages to mask her way through life and only unload her frustrations on the one person in the world who loves her unconditionally. Let's have an episode where she is unable to contribute to their normally working relationship and watch as his complete lack of support and zero close friends illustrates his utter dependence on structure and routine.

I mean, yes, Hollywood writing for ongoing series is often repetitive. You literally have a "procedural" genre where they go through the same basic structure with almost every episode. Some sitcoms are quite bad. Some are pretty funny (and don't involve laugh tracks). There's a pretty big difference between your average multi-camera sitcom and single camera sitcom. But at the end of the day there's just good shows and bad shows and those don't always correlate with popularity.