Most clichés we criticize, but some aren't bad.
Everything is a cliche. That last sentence is cliched sentiment (and so is this sentence; what is more cliche than meta-commentary?), but it's also true. There are only so many plots and plot devices out there. The trick is not to do something truly original. Nothing is truly original. The trick is to make us forget that this has all been done before, to make us fall in love again, to rearrange the furniture to make the room feel fresh, to be relatively original (in terms or present expectations defined by prior repetitions.
Cliches are a valuable shorthand. Stock characters, for example, are cliches, but they are also economizing. They don't need to be explained and we only have 90 minutes to get this s**t done. Cliches offer a nice coordinating matrix of meaning, right? "OK, we're here and we're doing this and this is the sort of person we have and they've got a familiar motivation." This allows us to focus on the stuff that is unfamiliar - what the writer wants us to pay attention to.
Our cliches also express the politics of the writer. The evil or jerk cop who expresses collective displeasure with policing (Defund the police! ACAB!). On the other hand, there is the maverick hero cop who "does what needs to be done" because other cops are hamstrung by liberal bleeding heart laws (e.g., Dirty Harry). The "realist" film with a scientific view which expresses a sort of anthropological interest in it's characters - no one really right or wrong. The "spiritual" film with an axiological bent which commits to the goodness and badness of people. You don't have to "prove" your politics, if you can just "show" them as common visual "axioms" which are seemingly true (because they're so familiar). Let these commonplaces do the work for you, rather than read a manifesto as clumsy exposition.
Another variation on this that I enjoy (although it's usually limited to teen or college movies) is when they put up pictures of the characters at the end with a "whatever happened to" caption - telling the audience what the character went on to do or what became of them.
The first time I remember seeing this was Animal House. A common gag in comedies. However, was this aping/mocking this as a trend in historical biopics and documentaries? Did that come first?