Later editions of shadowrun, I think, drifted from it's cyberpunk roots into something that I guess could be explained more as post-cyberpunk or perhaps transhumanism(?) and the Shadowrunner team seem to have shifted from what often used to be a bunch of punks, anarchists, freedom fighters, rocketboys and other misfits living on the edge because it’s more exciting there than in a safe corp dormitory and who's main driver basically was to 'stick it to the man' ....into a team of sophisticated, highly specialized, hardcore, well oiled squad of deadly super criminal mercenaries running for one corp or special interest group against another.
I think there's an interesting question about what, exactly, cyberpunk in 2020 is. And I don't think the line is as crisp as you suggest.
Let's group together the most iconic, core cyberpunk the works of Gibson et al from, say, 1975 to 1990. So we're taking in Shockwave Rider, the Sprawl trilogy, the Marid Audran series, HardWired, Synners, Akira, Robocop, Blade Runner... all the classics. What are the hallmarks we see in common? Well,
high tech, low life, of course. A sharp line between the haves and the have-nots, with protagonists coming from the latter. Analysis of what it means to be human, particularly in the face of technological advances and duhamanising living conditions. A strong flavour of '40s noir, rooted in Raymond Chandler. A cynical, wry sense of gallows humour. A neon aesthetic. And a dystopic future that represents the fears of the time: faceless consumerism, ruthless capitalism, human life and identity totally devalued... and those who stand up to that future and say no (the punks in cyberpunk.)
The last two parts, though, were very much of their time, and quickly became outdated. Neon is no longer a futuristic aesthetic, and we no longer worry about corporate dystopia as the most likely disaster scenario. (You could also argue we already live in that dystopia, so we're not scared of it any more.) So "pure" cyberpunk diverges, or arguably, withers away as it becomes less relevant. There's not much post-2000 in literature or film or TV that fits with these tropes. Even Altered Carbon, arguably the closest match, leans more heavily into transhumanism and away from corporate dystopia. Elements show up in various places - Mr Robot, The Expanse, Inception. But it's only echoes. There's a few books by lesser known authors that hew closer to the core themes, but whenever I read one, they read more like cyberpunk cosplay... they feel like pastiche. The vitality is gone. (Note that even Gibson hasn't written a book that's clearly and unarguably cyberpunk since 1988.)
Cyberpunk drew much of its power from being a reflection of time it was created, and we no longer live in that time.
But I think there are modern day analogues of (perhaps even successors to) cyberpunk because many of the themes above remain very relevant. So you can take some of those themes, mix in more modern ideas about dystopic futures, look at them through the lens of 2020 instead of 1980, and end up in interesting places. In particular, transhumanism is a very common theme. For examples of places we can look for inspiration:
- Paolo Bacigalupi, who writes about near-future world where power is scarce, climate change is destroying the planet, and people are trying to patch over the cracks with advanced bioengineering. This sub-genre is sometimes called biopunk.
- More transhuman biopunk - Annalee Newitz's Autonomous is fantastic. It opens with a bootleg drug runner carrying a load of black market antibiotics, manufactured illegally as they infringe patents, to be sold to people who can't afford the real drugs. What's more cyberpunk than that?
- Charles Stross has some interesting work in this field; Accelerando has interesting things to say about transhumanism. (I'm told the pseudo-followup, Glasshouse, is good too; haven't read that one.)
- Cory Doctorow does a lot of work in this area. Walkaway springs to mind.
- While reminding myself of titles, I've just discovered Peter Watts has some - the Rifters trilogy. I need to read those. I loved other stuff by him I've read (Blindsight and Echopraxia.)
- Christopher Brown's Tropic of Kansas is extremely punk-in-cyberpunk, although it features almost no advanced tech and isn't really a sci-fi novel in the traditional sense. But it's about the only book I've ever read that I felt could have been written by William Gibson.
So the way I see it is: "pure" cyberpunk is a bit of an endangered species, but if you broaden your focus a little, there's plenty of life in its successors. And that's what Shadowrun has tried to do, mostly by incorporating transhumanist themes and technologies but also adopting things like the wireless Matrix. It's moving with the times, at least a little, and I think it's a good thing.
The extreme focus on only playing as hyper-deadly mercenaries... ehhh, that part I'm less keen on. I think it's a projection of slightly toxic masculinity into the game space, everyone wants to be cold-blooded killers and nobody wants to do good for the sake of doing good. Fortunately, that part is easy to brush aside, and the setting remains rich enough and the rules flexible enough to support a much wider range of stories.