I think over the piece Marco has slightly better portrayal. I reckon it’s still close between all the YC1’s, even as hysterically funny and embarrassing as Marco treating King and Queen was King will go on to show much more impressive things in the future.
Katakuri suffers slightly imo by having very localised hype, by his siblings. And Brûlée has admitted she knew it was just a part he was playing to protect them. Katakuri’s performance would be a lot stronger if we actually knew what his undefeated record meant- who had he fought, does that include draws. Not to say he’s a fraud- he clearly is one of the strongest characters in the series, all things considered, only the top tiers are definitively above him.
But Oda’s had the chance to associate Katakuri’s hype with known qualities, and he hasn’t done it. The strongest example of what I mean by this is the chapter where Shanks meets Whitebeard. Going into that chapter, we knew that Whitebeard was the WSM, and the only one who had fought Roger and lived (that has since been discovered to be a wee bit of an exaggeration by Buggy, but we didn’t know that at the time.) We had discovered only a few chapters before that Shanks was also considered one of these Emperor type pirates, who are the most powerful and in the New World. And in that chapter
-Shanks notices Marco and asks him to join his crew
-Whitebeard reminisces about the duels between Shanks and Mihawk -Whitebeard hypes up Sengoku and Garp as leftovers of the great era with Roger
-Shanks says that he knows Ace is strong
-Shanks drops the big bombshell that Blackbeard was the one who scarred him
Because these are all known quantities to the reader, with a big role in the overarching plot, it‘s great hype for everyone involved. Marco’s gotten a lot of this in his time- clashing with the Admirals, Gorosei naming him above the other WB Pirates, him being the one the Minks want to fight in the war, BM, who is exceedingly stingy in handing out praise, implying she’s had a reasonably high opinion of him, blah blah.
Oda’s never taken that route with Katakuri, and he has had the opportunity. He could gave us examples of Katakuri’s undefeated record, saying something like “even in fights against the Whitebeard Pirates or Roger Pirates, he’s never touched the floor!” or examples of powerful pirates he’s beaten or been undefeated against. But we never got anything like that. In the chapter where Luffy was named Fifth Emperor, it could have been emphasised that Luffy managed to defeat the undefeatable Katakuri- instead he’s just lumped together with Cracker as Big Mom’s officers. Some of the Beast Pirates could react with apprehension or awe about Luffy beating Katakuri- nada. It’s little things like that that make me put Marco above Katakuri.
That all might sound really harsh and like I’m saying that Katakuri is a total fraud, again, that’s not what I’m saying. Marco vs Katakuri is in my opinion an extreme diff for Marco. When Oda decides to hype a character, he doesn’t really do dehyping, it‘s the fans who nitpick like I’ve done above. But I do feel Oda could have made an effort to solidify Katakuri’s hype, which would put him above the other YC1’s, and he has not done it.
When it comes to actual feats Katakuri is both blessed and cursed in that no other YC will have anywhere close to a fight of the length that Katakuri had, meaning he got to show off more, and also cursed in that he fought the protagonist so was obviously going to lose. CoC as an argument I’m happy to completely ignore until Wano is over- Katakuri showed it out of nowhere near the very end of a long fight, and showed nothing overly special with it.
g3 > base linlin small hand 
