>>32539
Klasky-Csupo's style on a slice of life show about a teenage girl was a terrible idea. Their style on a show about how life is weird through the perspective of babies (which are also weird) worked much better. I'd also say it worked pretty well on things like Ahh!! Real Monsters or Santo Bugito. But yeah, it had no place on things like As Told By Ginger or Rocket Power. Wild Thornberries is kind of on the edge. It works for the animals, but not so much for the people.
Nickelodeon Studios/Games Animation toned it down a bit but was still a bit weird, hitting a balance that let them do more stuff without it just seeming fucked up. Rocko's Modern Life looked good, but the style didn't contrast with them doing more down to earth stuff sometimes. Catdog was kind of in a similar boat. Rocko clearly wouldn't exist if it wasn't for things like Ren & Stimpy making Nickelodeon want to do more adult, more creator-driven stuff. And Spongebob wouldn't exist without Rocko.
Of course Rugrats and Doug deserve a lot of credit too. Rugrats helped to get Klasky-Csupo all that other work, even if sometimes they weren't actually a good fit for the subject matter. Doug helped to popularize a whole bunch of other slice of life shows, perhaps most obviously Hey Arnold (which existed in concept before, but may not have been picked up by Nickelodeon if Doug wasn't so successful).
With all the different studios doing stuff on Nickelodeon at the time, though, I'll at least say that I appreciate that they had dimension to them. Even as a kid it bugged me how flat everything on Cartoon Network looked at the time. Later I learned it was because John K. moved over to Cartoon Network to help develop their earliest original shows after he got fired from Nickelodeon. Indeed, Ren & Stimpy did have a flatter style than the other Nickelodeon shows, but not to the extreme degree the Cartoon Network shows had. But John K was a good fit there because of course the earliest Cartoon Network Shows were literally Hanna-Barbera shows, made by people trying to bring back HB's glory days. And to a large extent, they did. And then HB just got renamed Cartoon Network Studios. But HB was good for doing a relatively good job with low budgets. They still looked like shit compared to actual good animation. HB was good because actual good animation was for theatrical cartoons at the time. But by the '90s, Disney, Nickelodeon, and WB were actually putting good animation on TV again. Look up the influence of Disney's Gummi Bears, which has drastically better animation than any tv cartoon for decades before it, because Disney realized that by investing more money they could make more money in syndication.
>tl;dr: You're wrong. Most of those shows did work. They were very successful. Even the few that were actually ugly and shouldn't have been successful.