First of all there isn't actually a lot of Reverse Harem Anime relative both to standard Male with multiple Waifu harem Anime and other types of Shoujo romance. The main Blog you'll find on specifically this Genre is mostly talking about Manga, Games and Books, I may well be less disappointed if I read more Manga and Visual Novels, but Anime specifically is what I'm here to talk about.
My perspective is also mainly on relatively recent stuff, and stuff mixed with other Genre elements, but the same is largely true of the standard Harems I compare them to. And I'm not really making the criticisms you've probably seen before.
My issue is how they barely qualify as Harems. In male lead Harems even though actual non Monogamous resolutions are rare, all the girls still matter. My memories of watching Code:Breaker and Code;Realize have faded a bit but I really felt it was mostly just a romance between the Heroine and the main dude while the others guys were just sorta there.
Even in Sword Art Online, where there was never ambiguity that Asuna is the main heroine, Kirito does develop legitimate unique bonds with the other characters. In both Fairy Dance and Phantom Bullet Kirto's storyline with the new Heroine work as romances fairly well even though they don't get together, because not all romances work out.
And Code:Realize is specifically an Otome Game adaptation. With standard Harems the Visual Novel based ones are usually the best at actually treating all the girls close to equally, since in the source material it's literally up to the audience. Sugo no Sora is something most people only care about because of the controversial Twincest route yet they included other routes in the Anime adaptation anyway. In Clannad it becomes clear who'll win by late in season 1 but it felt reasonably up in the air at first. And some don't even designate someone the main one.
For most of history most cultures' gender norms expected men to have multiple lovers but largely forbade it for women. Even when Monogamy first became the only form of Marriage that was legal fidelity was truly expected only of the wives. While Anime is more transgressive then mainstream western media in a lot of ways, including specifically on gender. This particular double standard seems to be one even Otaku struggle to move past, and so Anime becomes less willing to follow through on the point of a Reverse Harem even then a CW Teen Drama.
However one reason I feel somewhat confident this is less of a problem in the more prolific and experimental mediums Anime is often adapted from, is the Boogiepop situation.
In the first Boogiepop Light Novel it's explicitly most morally virtuous character is a girl who is in a Polyandrous relationship, and that is not treated as her one flaw but as intrinsically tied to why she is the kind of person the world needs more of. And the low budget but still very good Live Action movie wasn't afraid to include that. But the 2019 Boogiepop Anime (which I still overall like) in the process of condensing the first novel to only 3 episodes completely removed one of those boyfriends so they could not acknowledge this at all.
So I'm sure Otome Games actually give more equal treatment to all the Husbandos and maybe even sometimes have Poly endings. But is there an Otome game counterpart to School Days where the Heroine can actually wind up becoming a Cheater while asking the audience to sympathize with how that happened?
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