I should be just about the target age (if on the young end of it) for “Ready Player One” and the book(s) and the movie utterly and completely disgusted me, and in fact gave me a weird bleak sense of dread when they first became known.

Same. The Iron Giant thing was especially offensive to me. The whole point of the original Iron Giant movie was that the giant didn’t want to be a weapon. But in Ready Player One he’s treated as just a weapon the protagonists can exploit. Disgusting.