[Kiwami]

The people who say this kinda stuff obviously never watched a Showa series because Showa Riders aren’t "lone wolfs". They have a close group of friends / family supporting them and in most instances a whole squadron of children operating as their allies.

The number of people involved is close if not more than what Drive had within his Special Investigations Division. It serves the same purpose. Riders always have a close group of human allies, in some cases even government supported Special Forces, and a group of criminal investigators is no deviation from this trope at all.

To the second point: Showa Riders also had "tribes" of enemies. Amazon had the Beastmen, Black the Golgom Mutants. And we can observe a pattern here: Both had individuals (Mole Beastman, Whale Mutant) who disagreed with the evil nature of their kind, betrayed them and joined forces with the main Rider, proving that not all of them are made evil but instead chose to be.

It's the same with Drive, I can’t recall which episode number it was but it was somewhere in the middle, we got an episode where a Roidmude didn’t want to fight. He copied the nerd-character whose name I cannot recall either, but it was the exact same setup: A "good" monster emerges from the ranks of the enemy, proving that they are not evil because of their nature but because they want to be evil.

This is a classic Rider trope and Drive fulfilled it. The Roidmudes aren’t addressed as sentient until one case forces the heroes to rethink their ways.