Hard to call Luffy the mvp here, protecting Vegapunk was by his own admission his mission and he failed multiple times.
Not to mention the embarassing display of stamina, laid out in the middle of the battlefield after a brief exchange against Kizaru. Then there's how useless G4 looked. How useless he looked against the Seraphims too.
Strawhats in general have looked pretty bad so far in this arc. Luffy hasn't been much better, his single saving grace has been WSG.
Almost seems like we went back a step after Wano so far. I think we might be getting to the serious stuff now though but it's extra pathetic knowing Luffy has been abusing his awakening the entire time and he's barely got anything to show for it, this is unusual even for Luffy's early arc jobbing standards.
MVP is reliant on comparison to others in that category
so while you can talk about failing to protect vegapunk with two top tiers hovering about
its also quite clear none of the strawhats have done anything relevant enough to be in the conversation bar perhaps sanji
kizaru's biggest contribution was making luffy use gear 5, he has done zero significant damage to luffy in this form . His mission to get rid of vegapunk, bonney, kuma, has been a complete failure. saturn stepped in and it seems they were finally able to do vegapunk in but thats least expected.
all things considered I look at the fact you have an admiral and an enraged gorosei here and neither have been able to get rid of one of their main targets till this chapter . for the most part if you ask why they haven't been able to , its been luffy. looking at the ending of the most current chapter , its about to get even more embarrassing for them .
any argument trying to paint luffy's performance here as pathetic really makes me question what standards he is being upheld to here in comparison to others because those standards would look even more grim on the the admiral and gorosei who are supposedly on the same table as the yonko.