Part of the reason I think this second season has been so disorienting for most people (myself included) is that it's positing itself as a tragedy (ala the first season of True Detective) when it's really playing as a farce. If it weren't written by a sententious crackpot like Pizza Man, I'd almost call it a postmodern experiment in straddling the line between high art and full-blown pulp.
Talk of the subversion of the tropes that defined True Detective in season 1 is sort of besides the point. It doesn't really matter whether or not a hoary, gruff male drunkard cop or an attractive but equally dour female drunkard cop ends up delivering inane aphoristic one-liners that would make Dostoevsky blush. What people have struggled accepting is that season is, in fact, VERY similar to the first season in structure, style, and writing. What's different here - and why people have gotten uncanny vibes from the progression of the plot so far - is the tonal dissonance that's coming to the fore. People bought the terror-teetering-on-the-edge-of-absurity dynamic in the first season because that town in Bumblefuck, Louisiana passed well as a supernatural little slice of hell. McConaughey taking method acting to a histrionic extreme was the only appropriate way to carry out a script equally loaded with nonsensical blather and armchair philosophizing, and it WORKED because he's a silly enough actor to bring home how fucked up that town really was. Vinci's most eerie quality is being a capitalist shithole full of graft and dipsomaniacal plutocrats. It's hard to buy these four dour sourpusses when it's played so straight. If, however, the show veered tonally into something more akin to Sin City rather than its current dynamic of being like Inherent Vice if Pynchon actually respected literature and had no sense of humor, then the show would work quite a bit better.