There are no right or wrong in fiction, only ideas that work or don’t. Sometimes, you need freshness.
In 1975, Moebius draw the biggest cyberpunk influence ever, a short-comic called The Long Tomorrow. It’s a classic police story only it’s happening in the future. The fruit of Dan O’Bannon writing and Moebius’ imagination, this short story influenced absolutely everyone from Blade Runner to Akira to the 5th Element to Cyberpunk 2077.
The Long Tomorrow describes a giant, high density city in part because mid 70s, this looked like the future of cities for their authors, men born right after WWII, who grew up thinking about reconstruction so much and who saw huge public housing projects being built all around the world in the 50s and 60s.
Cyberpunk 2077 is said to be "true" to the tabletop RPG game made in 1988, with the influence of Blade Runner, 1982, which in turn was influenced by The Long Tomorrow, 1975.
I mean, let’s ponder on the fact that a computer game scheduled to ship in 2020 is “true” to 1975’s anticipation of the future, when we’ve been having so many things that are drastically changing the vision, especially with fiction happening on the west coast of the USA.
– High density housing with very diverse population didn’t/doesn’t work.
– We have wireless-everything, delivery-everything-same-day, drones. Robots that jump, exoskeletons.
– Poor people don’t live in expensive “luxury” condos in towers, they live in their cars, on the curb, with 2 phones, 1 tablet and a blanket. They charge their phones in stores, malls and public spaces like libraries. Poor people live in small houses with 10 other people.
I think it’s kind of a mistake to act as if there was one and only one definition of Cyberpunk and Authorized Aesthetic and that it was coming from 75-88. There’s so much to re-invent in terms of cyberpunk universe considering what we’ve seen grow as tech trends in the past twenty years or so.
Cyberpunk would draw a lot more people into its universe if it wasn’t targeted only to 35-55 year old people who bought Blade Runner in every conceivable format.