I started seeing a lot of hate videos on YouTube for this.

I am chagrin at not catching how the harfoots called him Grand Elf and he morphed it to Gandalf. That's some weak sauce there.

This has been said before, but Tolkien's writing was informed by very specific experiences in his life - his religious beliefs, experiences fighting in WWI, and his dedicated study of proto-English peoples all informed his narrative. As an example, Orcs are not given a "humanity" in Tolkien's narrative because they were symbolic of the growing military-industrial complex Tolkien saw emerge in the wake of the World Wars. They were drones, more killing machine than human. RoP fundamentally misses and discounts the above elements that define the tone of Tolkien's work, resulting in a story that feels more like "Marvel in the Middle Ages."

You can (rightly) criticize RoP for poor storytelling, changing events from the book, lackluster acting performances, and ESG/DEI casting choices, but to me the above shift in tone is still the worst thing about this show, pervasive in every second of runtime.

P.S. While not perfect, I do feel that Peter Jackson's movies kept the tone much closer to that of Tolkien's work, even The Hobbit movies, albeit to a far lesser extent.

If anything, this thread has made me want to buy the Lord of The Rings movie bundle. So, I think that's a good thing.