Personally what surprised me on re-watch and through the rebuild-series is how much emphasis there is on the beauty of industry itself - so many scenes of machinery on landscapes. This is particularly notable with Ramiel, the beam-weapon octohedron - in the original series they explain that the weapon to defeat it will require all of the electrical power in Japan. In the rebuild, they make the effort of "we have to build electrical equipment to get all the power in Japan into one spot for a few seconds, and we have to do this in like a day or two" feel real and amazing.
As much as Evangelion is a story about isolation and loneliness, visually there's a sort of celebration of industrial civilization - especially the rebuild. Not just individuals, but kind of a "together look what we can achieve" thing. In most other series, the images of machinery and industrial equipment weaponry splayed out over beautiful mountain landscapes and put to task would be dystopian... but in Evangelion, the artists instead make it heroic.
The original series has this too - everybody loves the machinery of Tokyo 3, even poor Shinji, it's just amped up in the rebuild.