If the show consisted entirely of its intros and outros, this would have been an easy 10/10. I have loved every one of them, beautiful animation and music and a charming heartfelt touch that feels absent in the show itself.
I'm....not a big fan of the rest of the show. I think it's just okay, while the battle animations are gorgeous and in typical shonen fashion the characters and world-building have distinct characteristics and traits that make all everything unique, I still didn't find the world of Jujutsu Kaisen a compelling one. To have a setting where curses are born out of the filth and negativity of human emotions, the series doesn't yield itself to a proper horror aesthetic.
The closest it gets to this is in Season 1 where most of the battles happen in the dark, either inside or at night and they all have a feeling of suspense and dread. Episodes like "Cursed Womb Must Die" or the bridge curse carry this theme well. But the rest of the show understandably softens that impact by being a shonen series. Episodes filled with battles after battles, so many different powers and laborous monologues explaining everything just doesn't work for me as I have never been a shonen fan after my teenage flirtations with DBZ.
Another problem, a massive one, is that while Jujutsu Kaisen has a story that has the typical good like themes, foreshadowings, twists and friendships, I feel like it suffers from not knowing how to tell them on a large scale.
Mini-arcs like the Kyoto Student Exchange Event and Hidden Inventory are some of the better part of the series because they tell you what the stakes and mission is, but the wider story seems to take inspiration from The Witcher and the worst seasons of Game of Thrones by having characters appear wherever they want to for a story beat and threats that come out of nowhere to make up an excuse for a battle. I didn't enjoy the Shibuya arc much especially because of how random and quickly everything starts and ends, certain characters vanish for a couple of episodes and then appear when they have a battle but it never feels like we are building towards something. This feeling of isolation/fragmentary conflicts and events made even the larger fights boring for me as I struggled to finish the show.
Regarding the animation change for the 2nd season, I don't mind it. It's clearly there was a purpose for this change as they must have thought the more realistic proportions and movement of characters wouldn't translate well for some of the crazier fights in Shibuya, thus they moved towards a little more minimalistic but still beautifully intense style of fights that show a more artistic variety to each of them. Example being Choso vs. Yuji with it's blue/black sharp color pallete with neon lights.
Also did anybody hate that sorcerers were fighting in bright daylight, leaping out of buildings in Hidden Inventory? Very Pacific Rim: Uprising-esque of them to do that
Overral: I could compare it to Demon Slayer, in that both are beautiful looking shows with a very typical shonen story and incredibly basic characters. Animation-> 4.5/5
Story/Pacing: 2.5/5
Sound design and music: 5/5 (as I didn't find anything wrong with the performances and loved the score)
It might be that the most recent Demon Slayers thing I saw was Infinity Castle and thought that was a pretty good movie even if I it had very cliched shonen thing. That movie was intense from the get go so the fights didn't bother me much
About the horror thing, I remember thinking about Tokyo Ghoul and the first few chapters of that when I started this anime. I never got too far but it had an ambience of horror that was carried very well
I think Infinity Castle as a pastiche of that one part of the Chimera Ant arc is okay at first but it seriously loses steam and by the time they get to the second-to-last final boss it just fucking sucks in terms of the fights even if the story still has good elements (and then Muzan is just flat bad by the end). I haven't seen the movie yet but I think it only covers like half of Infinity Castle or less, and it's probably better animated because the anime is honestly way better-looking than the manga relative to their respective mediums. Regardless, a problem I have with the whole series is that it's the epitome of the Stan Lee quote that the character who wins the fight is simply the one the author wants to win, rather than there being much of a "reason" within the world itself, while I'm one of those sorry battle manga snobs who is mainly interested in the reasoning and how it relates to the characters.
I don't like TG but it's definitely more horror than most shounen, at least pretty far into it. It's really probably the most horror among battle shounen that have ever gotten any prominence (besides Chainsaw Man, anyway), so you might want to check it out again, though the sequel/spinoff stuff is much worse imo. That mangaka went on to make Choujin X, which I personally think is a lot more interesting but is much less horror (though not none, there have been panels where I felt like I was looking at Chainsaw Man, funnily enough).