Venom was on a good trajectory character-wise until about late 1996, though the insistence of writers to have his comic feature tons of guest appearances really dragged down the character. The early reboot era was underwhelming, The Hunger was quite promising, but I had absolutely no love for the Gargan (I did really like Anti-Venom). Agent Venom was amazing and I'm sorry that the main story was cut story in lieu of Superior Venom and later Space Knight (the latter of which had potential but was too superhero-y for Venom). I absolutely love the new Cates/Stegman run, as both really seem to understand the character.
The thing about Venom is that venom works best when he isn't treated as simply an edgy, monstrous version of Spider-Man. Cates really shows that at his core, Venom is about paranoia, disease, cosmic dread, isolation, addiction, and the twin fears of both being alone and being overly reliant on someone else for just about everything in your life. Eddie Brock is a well-meaning but deeply disturbed individual who can barely function without the symbiote, a highly erratic, cruel, and utterly inhuman space monster that has and sometimes still does pretty much make Eddie its slave. The current story, The Abyss, really shows how the two are almost becoming a single organism with two minds, with neither able to fully function without the other. As we saw at the beginning of Abyss, we saw how when Eddie lost even a bit of control over the symbiote, Venom became nothing more than a murderous monster:
This perverse combination of codependency and body horror are at the heart of what makes Venom so terrifying. Venom, while working well as both a Spider-Man villain and lethal protector, is at his heart, a highly diseased, corrupted creature that, depending on the circumstances, is just as likely to devour somebody as he is to save them. Even at their worst, Peter Parker and most of the other Spiders would not do this. This balance between sanity and insanity, hero and horror, is what has led to some of the best Venom stories ever. Is Venom a he or an it? Is Venom an incredibly powerful, hard-edged hero or a mentally and physically degenerating alien slug dragging around a disease-ridden meat sack for sustenance? Is Venom more moralistic than many other supervillains, or the worst of them all? After all, it was a psychic scream from the Venom symbiote that nearly led to the Earth being eaten by an invading symbiote army. It is this dynamic that really makes Venom interesting, and makes for the best Venom stories.