What I like about Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk
There are really two things.
The first aspect is the way it balances the "pink mohawk" and "black trenchcoat" aspects of cyberpunk as a wider genre.
In "black trenchcoat" mode, the narrative focuses on very serious, very depressed, noir style detectives or hackers, often working for corporations or police forces or the government, and there's no working against the system really, there's not a lot of flamboyance, not a lot of punk to it, even if there's a lot of cyber, and it leans much more heavily into the 1984 style dystopian aspect of everything. Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, and to a degree Neuromancer — those are good examples. You can have some crazy or flamboyant stuff but it's mostly background fluff.
And then there's sort of the pink mohawk take on the genre, where the focus of the narrative is explicitly on punkness: active rebellion against the system, very flamoboyant and expressive use of clothing, style, music and cyberware, and the characters are usually thieves, crooks, freewheeling mercinaries. Examples of this might be A Song Called Youth, Hardwird, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
There are, of course, cyberpunk media that don't fit well into this binary, such as Serial Experiments: Lain, which leans more toward black trenchcoat, but ultimately is more of its own thing. This is not meant to be a mutually exhaustive dichotomy, but instead just a way of referring two the two dominant moods of the genre. The Landian nihlist mode ("do nothing") and the broader u/acc ("do as thou wilt") or even punk ("no future") response to the inevitability and inescapability of Capital.
A lot of cyberpunk worlds end up kind of picking one or the other, because there's this sense that you can't have both — that Decker (Blade Runner) and Becca (Edgerunners) don't work in the same narrative. That annoys me, because they absolutely can — as they do in real life. Would they like each other? HELL NO! Would they ever work together? Also no. But the key to situating them in the same world, and even giving them weight within the same narrative (or world meta-narrative), is to understand what a lot of scifi worldbuilders don't seem to, which is that these people would just exist and operate in different spheres of the society they're in entirely, that's all. That way, the narrative doesn't need to be all one or all the other. TTRPGs especially seem to struggle with this, because of their seeming need for a narrower, more focused, more single-tone world; they like to choose one or the other. Sometimes a pink mohawk world will bring in black trenchcoat characters but only as badguy mooks, like the Matrix, and sometimes a black trenchcoat world will bring in pink mohawks, such as the Rastafarians in space in Neuromancer, but that isn't really what I mean.
The other issue is that pink mohawk tends to be an extremely deep fried satire of capitalism, consumerism, the entertainment industry, industralization, technology, etc., and that can very quickly lead into Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Accelerando territory where it's just so absurd on the face of it that it's impossible to metabolize as anything but a joke — which would only be mildly annoying, except that a lot of what it's satirizing is also what's so alluring and almost beautiful about cyberpunk; the almost urban nature documentary aspect, the total freedom implied by the total social alienation and the blanket moral permissiveness of doing whatever you need to survive, the xenophilia of cyberware; and so it ends up being a satire that hates the viewer and the genre it's in, like Watchmen.
I think Cyberpunk(tm) actually manages to balance all this, though. It's WH40K levels of absurd bleak in the sourcebooks, and self consciously, intentionally, absurdly cool-obsessed, but somehow it makes it work, through actually loving what it's about even as it recognizes the horror. It's unconditional accelerationist to the core. It's Lyotardian — it understands ("hang on and spit on me") that "one can love swallowing the shit of capital."