Heh, I just played Smash Ultimate after a long while too. Had a few matches with my kid. I started strong, beating him in first few matches, then he got better and I lost 70-80% of the matches. 😀
I am sure that many people use games to make statements, but not all devs think like that. Many of them just think “it would be cool to play/develop a game like this” without thinking about any kind of statement they will be making.
I haven’t played too much of the MK: World, busy with DK: Bananza these days, but there is a really good DK track in the game. Have you played that yet? I still have about half the tracks that I haven’t played, so can’t say much about rest of them.
For me, Mario Kart is just to play with family, or sometimes play solo when I don’t want to play anything else, so don’t have much issues with it.