I hate seeing it constantly just turn to making fun of American culture in favor of say building the world around them and giving us more about the history and lore.
Good grief, yes, this!
Drawing on American cultural tropes for episode plots was inevitable and not a problem, and even the US city name puns for remote locations was cute at first. Then they produced a map of Equestria that was basically a map of North America, which was an awful display of imaginative bankruptcy, but tolerable in isolation. But it hasn't stopped. Increasingly the show is less and less fantastic and more and more mundane (in the literal senses of both words).
I was especially appalled at the handling of the dragon and griffin lands. They felt absurdly sparse. Have you ever played a video game (Bethesda games come to mind) where some settlement or city is built up over the first few hours as huge and major and super impressive, but then you finally reach New Vegas and it's, like, a handful of buildings and a few dozen inhabitants and you're like "this isn't a friggen city, this backwater settlement is barely a hamlet!" Such was my view of Griffonstone. And apparently when the Dragon Lord summons all dragons to attend a conclave, only a few dozen bother showing up for that, too.
This isn't a question of copy-and-pasting more background silhouettes, but of taking a stylistic and narrative approach that implies scale and depth, even if it's not relevant to the immediate plot.
I watched RDP: The Star in Yellow a few months ago, and was surprised at how it manage to briefly rekindle a sense of fantasy and lore and gravitas. The sense that we were peeking in to a deep fantasy world. I've not really felt that frequently in the show since the early seasons, and feel it very rarely now, if ever.