I think there's no argument against TLOU2 being a technical achievement. It looks great, it sounds great, and all of the motions feel incredibly realistic.
That said, when you look at the gameplay from a functional level, they didn't really do anything unexpected or interesting. It plays exactly like you expect a Naughty Dog game to play, and didn't improve much on the experience of TLOU1 (though I did find much of the play more seamless, which is a worthy improvement). Naughty Dog has a formula, and it's not one I'm particularly a huge fan of. Don't mind it, but I don't think it's better than any of the common formulas you see with Ubisoft, or Sucker Punch, or Rockstar. It just is what it is, and if you like it, you like it, but you know exactly what to expect.
Story-wise I sit closer to EE. I didn't find it bleak necessarily, there was some levity, I just didn't care about any of these people. Joel was the emotional driver of the first one, and they did a good job of setting up his reason for being. There was nuance to it and an arc, you went from experience a man who lost his daughter, to trying to survive, to having to take care of this girl while fighting parental feelings and the baggage of losing his daughter. There was a depth to that. TLOU2 doesn't have that depth, because it puts commentary over emotional depth. It's not so much a human story as it is a high-level story about cycles of violence, which is fine, but not as engaging. The one excuse I don't really buy is that Naughty Dog told the story they wanted to tell. Most publishers and most storytellers are able to do this, but it has no relevance to the quality of the story told.
I mentioned it before, but I also just found it boring. I generally have a problem where I "see" the design of a game and have trouble getting lost in it, so all the formulas were really obvious to me. "Oh, here are a group of bad guys, this is their movement pattern, these are my options" or "I have to drop down into this basement, so I will have to fight something to move through it, there is blood on the walls, so something is going to jump out at me, I'm in an area with a ton of resupplies, this means the next area will require me to use a lot of them." All those little obvious formulas made it feel more on-rails than I think ND wanted it to feel.
When you have a game where the formulas are fairly apparent, the message is surface level and without much nuance, and the characters are all generally unlikeable (or uninspiring, or cliche, or whatever you want to call them) then it's hard to overcome technical achievement for me. Full respect to anyone who had a different experience, because how we interpret these things is always going to be subjective, but for me it was just a boring slog that I wanted to love, was dying to find something to like, and just ended up feeling pretty empty about the experience. I didn't have fun, feel anything, or learn anything, and I want a story that does at least one of those things.
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