What technology can help western animation catch up to anime?

disney to embrace extend extinguish anime artstyle lmao

What's the earliest possible date such culture/desire could emerge?

Once globohomo dies and a new civilization rises from the ashes.

Not in the near future
Most Westerners like are literal orc brutes

It's the writing and artistry that differ. Western narrative styles focus on external action to reveal internal motivation, Japanese styles focus on internal conflict to external pressures. Hence the western preference for visual hyper-realism with relatively superficial feels.

When was the last time you saw a character in western media arguing with themselves in an internal monologue or where the artistic style changes dramatically to reflect their changing internal state? Generally characters have to express their feels in relation to someone else, either in contrived exposition scenes or flashback. The closest writers come to internal states is near death scenes, and even those are often just an excuse for a dead character to come back and provide words of wisdom. Characters talking to themselves is generally shown as a sign of madness.

I think this partly explains the performativity and theatricality of a lot of discourse on social media. People act out roles in relation to other people, often (and maybe unconsciously) employing them as unwilling props, which in turns gives rise to lots of arguments that provide an excuse for further drama. Japanese culture is more regimented and repressed, but emotional expressions are more sincere and authentic, though they can also indicate shallowness or weak character..

western animation is already up to par
arcane was pretty well made, no difference to japanese anime when it comes to animation

Why always use the dark brooding aesthetics?

I think we've had a few like dragon prince, arcane and invincible recently. I think the generation that had grown up with stuff like adventure time and gravity falls which in general have more complex story plots than traditional western cartoons may help.
In a sense, I think more complex western cartoons had a resurgence in the mid 2010s and they remind me a bit of those in the early 2000s though aimed as a younger demographic.

most of the show takes place in an under-city, so it's bound to be dark

relfection of the soul

isn't netflix over

Do you think anyone would want to watch a 'woke' anime? Netflix is dying because they produced only woke garbage and Blackrock stopped pumping money into them with ESG scores.
The whole culture of narcissism will have to die before anything reasonable will take its place.