After a while you need to stop caring about the overall plot (which is pretty interesting on its own, but that is like drip fed to you) and start enjoying the arcs individually. Usually the structure is that they get to a new island, get to know the inhabitants and their culture and individual characters, the crew finds a mystery, problem or conspiracy, and they help the inhabitants. Quite often there are also multi-island plots that tie up all the plots of each individual island.

Admittedly the solution is always inevitably “Luffy punches the bad guy really hard in the face” while the rest of the characters are usually busy punching the bad guy’s underlings, but since you end up liking both the main characters and the characters they meet in each island (and the relatively rare but much beloved recurring characters), you don’t mind it as much.

Yeah, I’m always surprised at how common the opinion “one piece gets good after 50 episodes” is. One piece was pretty fun from the very start to me. Later episodes actually get worse for me because of how much they drag. I had to switch over to One Pace in dressrosa because I thought the actual plot was amazing, but I couldn’t handle the pace of the actual show.

The answer, according to the original definition of meme: yes