This is one of the defenses I see given for Ultimate Spider-Man and its story and its utterly baffling to me. There's no themes in the book that could possibly excuse your main protagonist being an utter borefest with no character arc, I'm sorry.
"The point of Peter is that he's meant to be a protagonist who's stagnant and a failure who doesn't have a character arc or accomplishes anything". What are we talking about? This is the definition of "themes and such".
The book continually tells us that Peter is special, but Hickman is too busy doing anything he can to not write Peter, that whatever message Hickman is trying to convey with this theme falls completely flat. With endgame and the monologue of Carnage, its obvious that the whole point was to convey that Peter was never special, but the problem is that as a reader, I never even believed Peter was special in the first place! Ultimate Spider-Man had Peter literally do nothing in that book. If he wasn't important in his own book, why would I believe that he would be important in the big finale against the big bad?
What's worse is that because Hickman clearly wanted Peter to be a boring and stagnant character for some reason, a part of me was scared of him dying in endgame because I knew I would feel absolutely nothing from his death. I'm not sad, or angry, or even dissapointed. I feel NOTHING, because he was such a nothing character. It's such a pointless death that accomplishes nothing and even worse, says nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Somebody let me know if I'm sounding crazy here, but if you're defending Ultimate Spider-Man being boring by essentially saying that the point of the book was to be boring, I can't take you seriously. I just can't do it lol.
I know people love Hickman and so do I. He has written some amazing comics over his career, but all the themes and messages in the world can't save your story if your execution of those themes and messages are terrible, and the final result is a book that can cure insomnia.