yeah the majority of anime that gets posted on more public forums like twatter are your high school anime, harems or isekais with all the fan service sliders set to maximum

what does not get posted about much are your more serious series because they do not tend to have the most "out there" scenes

for example, the entire Gundam franchise can be serious and brutal when it wants to be (but I have yet to really come across a character death that felt cheap there have been a few that shocked me but never cheap) and has a pretty strong anti-war/war bad angle to it most of the time (oh and don't watch victory Gundam that one was... well there's a scene where bikini warriors attack a ship and get wiped out, legend has it that Tomino didn't want to make victory Gundam so he made it very silly - giant motorbike fortresses anyone?)

planetes is a 5 minutes in the future speculative science fiction show about mans first steps in colonising space and dealing with Kessler syndrome and mostly follows a space garbage disposal team

legend of the galactic heroes shows an interstellar war from both sides of the conflict never letting you really feel like one side is good and one side is bad but more that there are good and bad people on both sides of the conflict

pretty much anything by Makoto Shinkai will emotionally destroy you with no fan service just good writing, animation, art direction, music and voice acting

as for the entire cartoon thing, anime is drawings and the only thing that really limits what you can make with that is your imagination, and the quality of the drawings and animations is mostly dictated by the budget

live action has more moving parts (set dressing, costumes, effects etc.), and most live-action Japanese tv dramas I have seen have this amateur feel to them (the NHK taiga dramas do tend to be very good though) I think there's just more focus on anime so the live action stuff is usually used the fast and cheap option (a fast and cheap anime will just look bad in basically every way and not have the best VAs)

there are some great live-action films from japan though pretty much anything by Akira Kurosawa is a classic but made before anime really kicked off, more recently though the only "top quality" film I am aware of is unforgiven (a remake of a western but set in early Meiji era japan)

I just wish isekai fantasy would fuck off so we can go back to some great sci-fi