Yeah this is only the case if your criteria ends at Adult Animated Episodic Comedies.
Venture Bros starts as an AAC but turns to a genuinely compelling Dramady over time, and you never feel like the jokes are out of character or detract from the plot.
Scavenger's Reign is beautifully animated and has some incredibly compelling characters. Incredible scifi worldbuilding.
Bojack Horseman will drift between a comedy and genuine character growth exploring the absolute worst that a broken man can do, and why he feels that way.
While it's much more episodic, Inside Job does have character growth throughout and the consequences of one episode at least tangentially carry over to the next, while the jokes are much higher tier than most stuff. It feels like it takes the audience's capacity to understand the underlining themes even in a fairly wacky show.
Mars Express is one of the most incredible scifi movies I have watched in recent years. It tackles the questions of humanity, artificial sentience in capitalism and who you can trust in a neat noir package. My favourite film to ever come out of France.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners might have been a tie-in, but it left an impression on so many people for a good reason. It handles themes of autonomy, opportunity and trauma in a way that isn't overclouded by its action-packed fight scenes.
Porco Rosso might be family friendly enough to let your kids watch it, but it's still a tale of survivor's guilt, a growing fascist state and how isolation plagues one's own self perceptions. It's delightful to watch at all ages and gains a new level to it the older you get with each rewatch.
Invincible is a love letter to comics and its source material, handling mature themes even setting aside its infamous gore. It's brutal, it's harrowing and it takes its audience seriously in what they can handle.
Genndy Tarkatovsky's Primal is a wonderfully well animated and quite literally wordless narrative that tells an amazing story despite its own self-imposed limitations.
The Animatrix is one of those seminal pieces of science fiction that you will constantly end up seeing parallels to in your life, not least if you're paying any attention to trans rights issues in the world currently.
You might notice that there's still a lot of scifi and comedy, and there's good reason for that. These are the two genres that have the most to gain from respecting animation as a medium: comedy can use the exaggeration of movement and flexibility to portray far out and hilarious situations all the better at a fraction of the cost, while science fiction has the ability to portray things that would be impossible practically or incredibly expensive in CGI. The problem isn't with adult animation, it's that you're refusing to look beyond 20+ year running IPs and Netflix doubling down on their mistakes in order to find the best stuff.
The standards will only raise if people continue to only champion or enjoy the good stuff.
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