Wow, I'm sorry I don't have as such of a high IQ as you. I guess I need to watch more Rick & Morty. But for Watamote, we will have to disagree on a few things.
First: Those failures are not meant to be adorable, they are meant to be the results of a long culmination of stress for Tomoko, coupled with her severe social anxiety. The scene at the fast food restaurant for instance, shows Tomoko making that disguise in order to get past her classmates. If she was to just walk past them, they wouldn't notice her at all, like how they don't notice her in class. Instead, Tomoko did end up making that disguise, but ended up getting noticed by not only one of her classmates, but her brother's friend.
This is significant. Because of Tomoko's social anxiety, she goes over the top to not get noticed. While the event was designed to be highly comedic and not realistic, it does speak a lot to a person with social anxiety. We wish we can just disguise ourselves, just go about the day not getting noticed. But the show explained, that if you just be yourself, then you probably wouldn't get noticed. Is that hard to understand? Yes. Wouldn't it be better to get noticed and make friends? Of course, and that's what people with social anxiety want. But that's really difficult, and it sometimes seems to be easier to get into that disguise. But of course, that disguise can come back to hurt you, in unpredictable ways.
Second: I completely, 110%, disagree with you that television "should be for entertainment, not a tool for self improvment [sic]". It is amazing that animation, which was essentially founded off a vaudeville act that tricked the brain to think it is seeing fluent images from paper, can have such an impact and resonate with us. Why feel any emotion at all to an optical allusion? With the philosophy that tv should just be entertainment, we cut ourselves so short to getting messages across, changing people's perspectives, and maybe even saving a few lives. If you want entertainment, watch a cat video.
But I'm not saying a tv show shouldn't be entertaining. Watamote is one of my favorite shows in the fact that it is entertaining. Hell, even amazing but "3deep5u" like shows like Evangelion and Legend of the Galactic Heroes are extremely entertaining. But there's a reason why people like those shows so much, other than entertainment. Those shows made you think, make you grant new perspectives on life, and if not life, at least anime. If we just made audio-visual media just for the sake of entertainment, our lives will be so unfulfilling and art would seem so dull.
Third: Feelings of being alone is a legit problem people even above 13 have. I know you must feel like it, there must so little people that have an IQ as high as you. But for social anxiety and depression, or as I should say, people who actually have anxiety and depression, we often feel vulnerable and that nobody can relate to our problems. It takes more than just growing up to understand this, and for most people, admittedly, more than just a 12 episode anime. But Watamote is a step in the right direction, and tries to do this. While I feel other shows did it better, like Welcome to the NHK, Watamote took strives and initiative to get people to feel this, even under a blanket of cringe comedy.
Fourth: Watamote is cringe, it is based off of the principle of cringe. If you didn't cringe hard to Watamote, it might be A: you've discovered these problems already, B: you're a wonderful beacon that has never suffered social anxiety, or C: you've seen way worse. As said in my essay, it's okay for Watamote to be cringe, and had merits as to why it is. But Watamote is based off a principle of cringe, and no argument can have the weight to validate against this.
If you did in fact read to the end of this wall of text, without scoffing, scotch in hand at your prestigious secret society of Rick and Morty fans at Harvard, I genuinely applaud you and apologize for sounding like a jerk. Criticizing is one thing, but outright pulling out insults to one of my writings legitimately insults me, which I think I have merits to feel that way. So I often tend to defend my writing to a tee, even little essays like these. But if you can provide a legit argument to what I just said here, that criticizes my writing, you might actually come of as someone who knows what they're talking about, and not a prick on the internet.