Your issues with Last Order also apply to the original series. Gally/Alita seemingly dying at the end of one volume and returning the next, stronger than ever, is exactly what happened after her fight against Zapan. I'm also not sure what you mean by there being no "true" events. Things have about as much weight in the story as they did in the first series.
The entire scale is different. LADDER and the rest of the solar system is not like the Scrapyard or the wasteland outside it. There's an actual infrastructure, and an extremely efficient one. Plus, Gally/Alita is in a much more prominent position than she was on earth, so her actions have consequences that reach much further and more quickly. Her past as Yoko even comes into play, which is something that wasn't really possible on earth.
Last Order has much slower pacing than the original series, which I can understand is a bad thing in the eyes of many people, but Last Order isn't really a story that would have worked if it had been told in the same way as the earlier series. There's a lot more stuff going on at any given time than was ever the case in the first series. There's politics going on in the back AND foreground, fights are simply much more elaborate due to the much wider variety of abilities and technology available to the characters, Gally/Alita's past is coming back to haunt her, there's multiple Novas walking around the place, one of whom is worse than any of his other incarnations while the others are still insane and unpredictable, the list goes on. The idea that there's less backstory in Last Order than in the original is absolutely ludicrous. It's categorically untrue. Last Order deals with a vastly greater amount of backstory than the first series did. There's loads and loads of over-the-top characters. Sechs, Zekka, the Twins, all Novas, the press, Rakan, Zazie, Ping Wu, Zycrow, Toji, virtually all Venusians and certainly all Jovians. Actually, that's almost every character in the comic. Almost every character is still quite over-the-top in his or her own way.
And part of the pacing issues stem from the update schedule, honestly, which is partially to blame on Kishiro's publishers trying to continually fuck him over.
Your main problem, in fact, seems to stem from the fact that you've not been paying very good attention to the story. Mbadi, the Big Bad (as far as we can tell at the moment) is Gally/Alita's inferior on a physical level, but she needs backup to even move in his presence. And while she could kill him at any time, she actually EXPLAINS in the story that this wouldn't solve anything. They are fighting for the Scrapyard's future, after all. Those stakes seem pretty high to me, so I don't know what you're complaining about that nothing seems to matter in the story. Your mentioning of the fights being boring back-and-forth generic Shonen stuff are blatantly false as well because most of the fights are about each participant trying to get their opponent into a position where they can deliver a final blow to them. Some of the fighters are fantastically durable, so those final blows don't always work, but the idea that it's a continuous contest of escalation is ludicrous. That certainly wasn't the case in the fight against Caerula, for instance, and Zazie's recent fight against Rakan is also almost purely tactical.
In fact, your really rather childish comment about the ZOTT shows that you were probably never really interested in approaching the series on good faith. You dislike it simply because it's not exactly the same as the original, regardless of whether it has any actual merits or not. But the truth is that the art is leagues better in Last Order than it ever was in the first series (which was also riddled with childish humour and might even be considered a black comedy more than half the time) and Kishiro is spending a lot more time on his world-building this time around.
It's not a perfect series, but neither was the original. And like the original it's still incredibly enjoyable and oftentimes brilliant. It's just not the same kind of story as the first series. The narrative style of the first series wouldn't work as well in this setting, even. It could easily come across as shallow and rushed. COULD Last Order have been told in a similar way as the first series? Possibly! Does it lose anything by taking longer? No, and it the opposite is likely true. You have to remember that Last Order is not the same series as the first. Virtually a decade has passed between the two in real time and Last Order is just as manic as the original, but it's simply dense with information and backstory, spread out over a much shorter timeline where individual actions have a lot more consequences.
So I don't agree with you and I don't think your review is very good, on account of how your criticism doesn't really make any sense.
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Great original, so-so follow-up.
Set in an After The End gritty Cyber Punk future, I rather enjoyed the original series, due to having a decently complex plot, many interacting characters, a heroine that was not invincible and got beaten pretty badly several times, requiring the help of other characters to overcome her problems (not always as she expected). The drawings were deliciously detailed and many of the characters were crazy over-the-top, both in actual character and character-design. Deaths were meaningful and contributed to the plot. The darkness of the world was present everywhere, with disturbing details everywhere (Kaos and the brains, anyone?). The shards of backstory littered through the series made it a shame that the author had to end the series early.
Contrast that to Gunnm Last Order, which keeps the over-the-topness but removes about everything else, leaving a boring Shonen fighting series that has combats that take forever, no true events (gosh, Gally dies? Guess what? she's back next volume, stronger than evar!), supportive characters that only serve to cheer on the main characters and make 'witty' comments about their over-the-top fighting moves that will surely beat the enemy to a pulp (except that they often don't), and almost none of the grittyness of the original. Most of the supportive characters that are carried over from the first series are flat, stereotyped parodies of themselves. The new supportive characters are either nobodies or essentially characterized by teenage humor - there's two characters that use their (uncensored) penis to punch holes in things! The Big Bad is all talk and could probably get killed by Gally in five seconds, yet the author lets him live because he is required for the plot. Main culprit: the ZOTT, which could better stand for "Zenith of Total Turd".
The author seems to abuse the gritty Cyber Punk original's popularity to come up with mindless drivel that is just boring like hell. Even the additional information on science and history that he used as inspiration sound...uninterested. I frankly cannot understand that this pile of crap has been allowed to continue for longer than the original series. The only positive notes are the existence of Sechs (who is over-the-top like a character of the old series would be) and the barely present bits of backstory.