I have the opposite experience, I only watched it a couple years ago and thought the hype would totally kill it for me, but I actually ended up really enjoying it and EoE in particular stuck with me. I loved the idea that love is born of the risk we take of truly being known by other people.
I will say that the quality of the Netflix dub probably helped a lot. I know they changed some translations which kinda sucks, but overall the voice acting is so much better. No hate to Spike Spencer, he’s obviously a very prolific voice actor, but I think his performance of Shinji is at least part of why people thought he was so whiny. We were originally going to watch through the rebuild movies dubbed, too, but it was so bad we decided to switch to sub.