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Frieren is so good when you don't have some racist prick in your ear screaming about how demons are libs and minorities
(hexbear.net)
Japanese Frieren fans ask themselves what Himmel would do.
American Frieren fans ask themselves what Himler would do
I think that is worthy in the context of fantasy. It is the exploration of the extension of a fantasy trope dating back to before written history. The man-eating trickster monster which can speak but is no less monstrous or more civilized for that ability. Fantasy has had monsters like this since long before fantasy was a genre of fiction.
Frieren is a story where these sorts of fantasy tropes are explored with more thought and focus than usual. For example, something a lot of people love about Frieren is that an elf isn't just a dude who happens to have seen a lot of stuff. An elf is a fundamentally different type of person. If you're going to live forever, your perspective on events in the tiny human lifespan of ~80 years is going to be different from the perspective a human has on those events.
Demons are just another exploration of a fantasy trope that is taken for granted. What if monsters that can speak to take advantage of intelligent/sapient/empathetic prey were actually the result of a long line of evolution? What would the end result of that evolution look like? What is the most effective form of a monster that preys on your natural inclination to cooperate with your fellow inhabitants of the world? They're not an allegory any more than the giant plant that saps people's life energy to feed itself is an allegory. The giant plant is just a difficult enemy to fight because of its anti-magic properties and its own magical effects it can inflict on people. The story of how it was defeated was fun to watch because of how difficult an enemy it was and how clever the main characters have to be in opposing it. The demons are the same, with the difficulty being that you look like a monster yourself if you just blast it in the streets. That they look and act like people is no more than a challenge for the main characters to overcome.
Real life has monsters that are human in appearance, but completely hostile to human life, the bourgeois. Them having complex inner lives doesn't make the guillotine any worse an idea. Them having no inner life would add nothing to the story especially if they had a simulated inner life that was indistinguishable from just having an inner life. That is just rasisct cost of paint to allow people the room to enjoy it.
If the demons in the story were just demons would it be worse? Are there any plot points that need the demons to lack powers of complex thought to work?
I guess I just don't understand why you feel it's necessary to ignore everything the story told you about this particular type of monster in order to reinterpret it as a racist story about about how some peoples need to be exterminated. What exactly does that add to the story?
Verisimilitude. The work is written in a world that seems like ours. In worlds like ours that is a thing people say and are both lying and wrong. So, it is a more artistically dense view to consider it in the context of them being an unreliable narrator.
A bunch of people that don't exist talking about situations that can't exist has less intresting things to say about life.