Kojima rates edgerunners

The term used was "overseas", not West.

Roughly speaking, the overseas market for anime has grown by 650% over the last decade, and recently overtook the domestic market in size. That's important: it means that in a very meaningful sense, anime made in Japan is now made for foreign consumption. That creates an incredibly strong urge to pander to the overseas market, most notably China and the US. This creates a pressure to appeal to the lowest common denominator, in the way that the American Transformers movies and MCU try to adjust their values to fit the Chinese market.

Besides consumption, the whole world routinely uses Japanese studios to produce their shows, most notably China, Europe, and Latin America. China would be even more important except Chinese markets are very restricted and advantages their domestic studios. The US is actually one of the least important markets to Japanese animation studios largely because US animation studios are themselves large players and have a distinct non-anime style. So the Japanese animation industry is enormously concerned with overseas interests both in production and consumption.

For instance, both the US and Chinese markets are considerably more censored than Japanese markets. Even without outright censorship in the United States studios will strive to arrive at a G, PG, or PG-13 rating for various markets; a children's movie getting a PG-13 rating has failed from the get-go. And Chinese censorship is among the strictest in the world. Depiction of sex most audiences wouldn't even notice gets you the banhammer from Chinese government censorship. And you're straight fucked if you criticize the Chinese government in any way or even Chinese culture. Think about how many movies used Russians as villains in the 70s/80s/90s. And the extreme fetishization of Japanese society. Now think about how many movies today use the Chinese as villains despite them being the main rival to American dominance.

In general, Japanese media and anime in particular is often considered the height of weird by foreign audiences; Kojima is a prime example where there are endless memes about him and he's widely recognized for his avant-garde material and auteur status. That weirdness is simply diluted when market forces and direct censorship are applied.

There's also been a spread of anime studios outside of Japan and lower budget productions will frequently turn to them. This means that even with the expansion of anime in general, these are desperate times for Japanese anime studios - an industry-wide depression both mental and economic. Beyond that, COVID happened which shrank the domestic market by 10% and that's a lot of tightened belts and lost jobs. Also while people still watch anime, COVID resulted in a cataclysmic shift from watching broadcast TV to streaming TV in Japan. For the consumer this doesn't mean a ton, but for artists and producers, any number of contractual terms have drastically affected $$$ distribution. Basically the Scarlet Johansson/Disney furball writ large.

tl;dr Kojima thinks bland anime is caused by pandering to overseas market, but Edgerunner is a return to form with Japan showing the world it's still got it