I really loved Glass Onion, I did, I wanna say that up front. However, despite the incredible power performance of Janelle Monae, I think Knives Out is still the stronger movie and it's due to one big reason.
Both movies are about tearing down rich assholes and highlighting how they'll do bad things to cling to wealth. Everyone in Knives Out is clinging to Daddy's estate for money they never earned. Everyone in Glass Onion is clinging to Daddy Musk's investment portfolio for their success.
But the awful rich people in Knives Out are actually potentially relatable to a good deal of people in the audience. Every left leaning person who went to a liberal arts college with the help of their family was made vastly uncomfortable being confronted with the question "would you sell out the staff to save your inheritance? What if you'd have to drop out of college, saddled with student debt and no degree to show for it, if you didn't act in the interest of your rich asshole relatives over the interests of a marginalized woman of color. Would you really stick to your professed values?"
In Knives Out, every character is confronted with the fact that their wealth is not earned and it's actually quite precarious and easy to lose; and all these Massachusetts Democrat Liberals are positioned to ask themselves what they'd do to keep what they have, or believed they had, and they all answer it with "anything."
Furthermore, a lot of them have enough complexity to them that they do feel like human beings you could know even if you hate them. They have clear emotional wants and needs besides money in addition to wanting money. Near the end, some of them even do put personal beef with relatives over financial ties. They have emotions.
In Glass Onion, The Shitheads are in the untouchable class of rich people. They are not rich people who could humbly identify as "upper middle class" when that's not really the case; nor could they ever truly lose their status as rich celebrities. They all have the ability to leave Miles' clique and they'd lose vacations on private islands but they wouldn't lose their standard of living. Lionel could easily get a job at another company. The Manosphere guy has his own audience he has built. The Governor of New York can surely get hired by consulting firm or lobby group. And our Celebrity Influencer character clearly has suffered plenty of controversy and bounced back fine. She has the money.
None of these people are in the audience. I mean maybe they'll watch the movie but they're only going to be one individual person probably watching it alone. The vast majority of the audience can point at these people and say "I'm not like them" which is the weakness of Glass Onion. A lot of people watching Knives Out could not say that they aren't like the rich people on screen. Glass Onion doesn't make anybody uncomfortable. Everyone hates this class of rich person, even really rich people.
Anyway that's my take.
