HBO's worst flagship show by far, not even close. Zero humor, emphasizing (even amplifying) the worst instincts of humanity (i.e. just to buy into the show's early premise you have to believe every male secretly wants to violently rape a random farm girl), multiple plot points hinging on the "shitty security" trope, new worlds and features and powers constantly introduced (surely due to writer's block -- hey look this "old west" park actually has a gorgeous beachfront that nobody ever developed). Just a dark, depressing, make-shit-up-on-the-fly, illogical mess.
Not every male, just a large enough sample size of rich males given enough "freedom". (It's implied that the park is super-expensive to visit, even after nearly a hundred years of existence. [The exact number is something like 70 years.] That's maybe the most implausible part to me that it was never quite commoditized on such a long scale. Though they did put a lot of money into upgrades over nearly a hundred years, though. Also, that's one of the answers for why you thought they were just pulling new features/powers out of a hat, they had a 70+ year timescale to play with and different pieces happened at different times. They just made it super confusing to figure when on the timeline most individual episodes and even scenes occur.)
Yeah I saw it as an allegory to liberte hedonism and in particular Le Marquis de Sade [1], from whom we derive the word "sadistic".
Sadism is a common enough fetish, and given the extent to which other "extreme" sexual fetishes are catered to today with technology it's absolutely plausible that a "sadism simulator" would be popular in a high-tech future society.
It's also directly a commentary on what real people are known to do in existing videogames with free enough sandboxes and few consequences. For instance, the various "prostitute scandals" of GTA such as the infamous number of people spending in-game cash on in-game prostitutes then killing them for "refunds" because they drop the cash like a pinata.
There are much worse tales out there, too. (Such as the awful "prostitution ring" of the extremely short-lived Sims Online and was part of why Sims Online didn't make it out of Beta.)
The TV version of Westworld had decades of videogame experience to draw from and did ask some hard questions of "if there was a real-life GTA you could visit, would players do the same sorts of terrible things because there were no consequences?" and takes the cynical answer of "well yes, certainly, at least some of them, possibly many of them". What we glimpse in the show is often many of the worst parts of that because the robots were programmed to see that as trauma much as humans would and are given plenty of reasons to see that sample bias (of rich, "game players") as the default state of humanity rather than a poor, sad reflection of it. (Which is partly what Season 3 is about, confronting some of that sample bias.) (So yes, the show is cynical about human nature, per the OP's comment, but it is partly, too, about confronting that cynicism in the face of a species "superior" to us baseline humans in almost every way.)
