While it copped a lot of flack, visuals wise there was pretty much nothing wrong with GitS.
The world of GITS never felt like a neon billboard strewn "Neo Tokyo", felt like it has always had a wider visual language than just that one note. Feels like the city is trying to demand presence as an entity in the remake while in the originals the city was mostly just an anonymous sea of sky scrapers that was then experience though more intimate close moments.
I realise Ash is a huge fan of Akira and I can't help but think how Neo-Tokyo plays almost as a larger than life character in that film has influenced his work in this.
Compare this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB-ik-Bpl0c to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixAHUWgBKsw&t=0m35s
Both of those clips also show how important background music can be in reception of the scene.
I guess giving the solograms - what they call them - a lot of airtime is one way to do that if you don’t want to explain why they’re there in the actual story.
Not that I'd mark it down for it at all, there's no shame in wanting to show off your work (especially when it's that good looking), and they never dragged on too long, they were just... oddly more frequent than expected.