You know, I've always thought it was what you said above, too—The new moral framework often excuses the villain for doing appalling things, yet demonises the new 'bad guys' for much more minor 'badness'. Often, these new 'bad guys' are the villain's canonical victims, since if they're bad then the villain having hurt them seems ok. Instead of acknowledging that these victims have a right to be angry, the narrative portrays them as mean for hurting the poor villain with their 'cruel' and 'whiny' expressions of pain and anger. And it's not like that isn't very much at play.

But I've liked a lot of villains and written/read a lot of stories that are sympathetic to them and shift things around so that they're the protagonists (sometimes villain protagonists, but also many times not!). And I kind of felt that a lot of it comes down to, well, which villain people have a personal affinity for, because the actual arguments about who does or does not """deserve""" redemption are often so transparent. But I think I have run into cases where I'm "uhhhh" about takes on villains as the Actually That Bad villains even though I don't even like them personally. And there is this sense that there's something fundamentally different about the author's worldview going on.

I do think there's often this underlying logic of who deserves sympathy as well as redemption that has many of the same pitfalls, and that's a factor here. It's not that people have to find all characters equally sympathetic/redeemable! But the underlying assumptions around deservingness are where I feel like I get tripped up.

Anyway, a lot of words to say that I suspect I feel pretty much the same.