I still gotta hand it to Danger Gal Dossier for providing some of its most important fluff for factions in entries that are for npcs ranked as mooks. who's the average pledge in NC's prime boostergangs? the book gives some examples

if it's Maelstrom it's someone like Ghoul (who's been brutally hazed by his hotzone pit boss), Raguel (a fanatic, also a former Inquisitor who pivoted from 'meat over metal' to 'metal over 'meat' on a dime but maintains the same fervent intensity, as if the binary itself is an ideological poison), and Drop (a tacticool dipshit, but also implying that the spikes and chains come from appropriating Central American War veterans, showing that some of the first mercenaries and some of the first boostergangers came from the same source). they're not super compelling as statlines, but because they're framed as case studies, it doesn't feel like you're taking a pretty detailed character and putting them in the shredder if you use them as a combatant.

they literally make this explicit with Shinmai in the Tyger Claws chapter, who has a name (Shinkichi Yoneda), has an upbringing (a refuge from the combat zone, living off the back of the gang infrastructure), and definitely has aspirations (become a world class swordsman), but is treated with utter contempt by his superiors for the interchangeability of his upbringing and aspirations from every other CZ refugee trying to "make it" through the Tygers' martial arts pedagogy. Shinmai is promised to get a new nickname if he lasts a year. The Four Kids localization for his name would be New Blood or Fresh Meat. you can quite literally have Shinmai die in a combat encounter, then use Shinmai again because it's clearly a hazing thing

some gangs do get a couple "generic" statlines in the form of the maelstrom scavvers (who Ghoul promoted out of), tyger claws bouncers, and so on, but it's telling the Fools in the Bozos chapter represents the 'average pledge' statline as a sort of 'type' in place of fully realized albeit 'typical' personalities (Dunce is a step up, literally a promoted Fool, but this is rendered as the exception and not the rule).

lastly, the book's a set of guidelines for npc generation, and all the npcs are exercises in the npc generator's guidelines, so it's an encouragement to make bespoke npcs even if they're weak, because that means creating a more fulsome picture of the world. not everyone is going to be statted like a PC if they're named, and having an interiority isn't the exclusive purview of 'powerful' or 'important' people. not every entity has to be hardened or unhardened depending on the party comp. the npc guidelines takes on a less restrictive definition for introducing hardened npcs, and i've seen it used as a blunt excuse to make no mook hit lower than a base of 12 ("well, Danger Gal says I can do that" is a weak excuse when previous DLCs introducing hardened enemies expressly said "no, no, do not introduce them willy-nilly because they're not for dominating your pcs, they're for making PCs who dominate combat still feel strong without utterly trivializing combat"), but i also think it's a good impetus to mix hardened and nonhardened statlines if that means giving the impression that world isn't power scaling to the players. if a party's all hardened characters, then that's just a party that's deadlier than the average street tough.

to give an example, one time my players tried to tap a contact they had in the Jodes for some hired help. unfortunately, the player who did this had a cool of about 2. this was a lifepath npc and a friend, so i went entirely on the performance to adjudicate how good the help would be, but the description was kind of poor. they were going to be assaulted by a cybersoldier fireteam and needed security, but the way the player worded it was they just needed some extra hands to patrol a place. the Jode shrugged and said she had two reprobates in town on a bender who'd be able to come help watch their apartment, holler for trouble if there is any, but probably think this is a different milieu to get wasted for a few more hours on someone's dime and leave.

my players were pretty disappointed their help was two unhardened road ganger statlines, but also these were Jodes, teamsters and displaced farmers. they're an elusive nation famous for long haul overland shipping. they're not famous for fighting. that's the purview of the Aldecaldos' Lobos and Metacorp cybersoldiers. when they got two people in town on a bender, they literally got two people on town on a bender. if their contacts were different, maybe if they laid more groundwork for the Jodes to send their best fighters, or even made a case that included "we will be fighting a corpo deathsquad," they might've gotten hardened road gangers instead. either way, unhardened npcs don't just vanish the second the pcs get tougher as a unit. the world contains multitudes. that kind of laissez faire attitude to making things optimal is what I like out of the system.

as much as you can make the numbers polished to a mirror sheen, make the encounters loaded with hardened enemies with the proper action economy, make PCs who perform all the optimal choices, you can also give an npc a base of 14 in Dance, make encounters that mix hardened and nonhardened statlines together just so the players feel the rush of how far they've come in the world, and put a Mr.-Studd-contraceptive-implant combo on your character sheet