I think they would say that the history of comedy has always been the history of mocking the unacceptable and exposing the taboo. All in the Family responded to the Civil Rights era by creating the world's most bigoted bigot and then inviting everyone to laugh at him, even knowing a nonzero percent of viewers were going to agree with him. The Chair and Abbott Elementary are 2020s efforts to point and laugh and cry at terrible current events. There's specifically a tradition of "war is absurd" as a comedy premise: Catch-22 for World War II, Blackadder Goes Forth for World War I, Dr. Strangelove for the Cold War, so on.
So part of why Marco appears on A-Town, why Tom doesn't mind the show, why some Santa Barbara residents watch it, is that it's letting you laugh at something that would otherwise make you scream in horror. Blackadder Goes Forth has a scene where a WWI general sets a 12"x12" square of sod on a table and says "took a lot of turf today"; the conversation reveals that the square foot of grass on the table is the entirety of the ground taken that day. It's mocking a horrific reality — that the British regularly sacrificed 1000s of lives for a few yards of battlefield, and that "winners" of WWI battles often had to be determined with a yardstick — but it's making a sharp critique of the powerful, and it's a solid bit of shock comedy.
Most people watching A-Town know that Daisy A. fixing her manicure in line to be reinfested, only to be sent home due to a paperwork error, is not an accurate depiction of being a controller. But its point, about the yeerks' kidnappings being arbitrary and their leadership being incompetent, would land well with a lot of ex-hosts. And the fact that the show takes the time to distinguish that Daisy and Zeptron 420 are two completely different people — something that I suspect some other postwar movies would neglect — is at least part of the reason for Tom's tolerance for the show. It's not great that the show chooses to convey that point with the Girly = Evil; Goth = Good trope, but at least the dramatic costume changes convey that Daisy's personality is not Zeptron's.
That said, Jean and Jake and everyone else who hates the show also has a point. Jean especially finds it so upsetting because half the jokes rest on an enthymeme of "Obviously Jake Berenson's parents are the most clueless idiots ever to breathe air." A-Town aspires to, like The Americans, show the hollowness of the suburban American ideal — that's why its sets look straight out of Leave It to Beaver — but that leaves Dr. and Mr. A mostly being the butt of the joke for their negligent and incompetent parenting. For Jean, that hits a little too close to home, in a way it wouldn't for Marco watching his fake-self fight taxxon puppets by holding up a stuffed skunk, or Tom watching his fake-self swap lipstick colors every time someone new controls her body.
So if A-Town aspires to be Blackadder Goes Forth, it lands closer to being South Park: sometimes funny and pointed, sometimes lending support to the bigoted views it tries to critique. Like South Park, the conversation about it will probably acknowledge its real social contributions (exposing Scientology, excoriating nationalism) while also showing the real harms to vulnerable people from the show's brand of comedy (turning "gay" into a catchall insult, resurrecting antisemetic myths). Like South Park, A-Town tries to mock things that need mocking, but it also spends almost as much time punching down as it does punching up.
