When the Simpsons first came on it was deeply subversive and that era of TV, where things were really opening up beyond the big three networks for the first time, has so fundamentally changed TV programming that people can forget (or younger people can just not understand) what TV was like in the 1980s before insurgents like Fox and MTV changed the landscape.
By the late 1980s the formula, form, and what was socially permitted on TV sitcoms hadn't changed much in 40 years. The Simpsons was a purposeful rejection of all of the 'rules' that sitcoms had followed to that point. A big part of that was the classic TV 'authority figures' who are always right, just, and caring were purposely subverted: the dad is a dumb, self-centered, abusive, alcoholic jerk, the cops are all corrupt and stupid, the teachers hate the children and don't care about their education, the principal is a pathetic loser with delusions of relevance, the mayor is corrupt and womanizing, the preacher just doesn't care at all and wants to be left alone; hell, the children's clown on TV is arguably the most immoral scumbag on the show.
Similarly, Homer strangling Bart was meant as a subversion of the "patient father sits the misbehaving child down for a heart-to-heart where things get resolved" trope of sitcoms of the previous half century; instead dad physically abuses the misbehaving child and nothing is ever resolved. Where TV sitcoms to that point were fantasies about what the best versions of American culture could be, the Simpsons was an over-the-top take down of what our culture actually was.
But, obviously, as the TV culture they were satirizing went away (in no small part because of their show's success) the show needed to change too. In 1989, Homer strangling Bart rather than having a soft-focused heart-to-heart with music rising in the background was unexpected, subversive satire. In 2023 it's just a depiction of child abuse whose original context is long gone. The same show just doesn't work without the cultural context it was created in and meant to lampoon.