I mean, I'm normally like that, but from what I remember I tried to watch it and turned it off partway through the first episode since that was basically just Illya flashing Shirou and the audience repeatedly.
Yeah, you don't run into your first kinda Fate-y darkish moment till episode 2 IIRC, and then not again till like 5-6ish. In a lot of ways it follows the standard Fate series conventions of starting with slice of life and then mixing in a few dark moments, followed with more slice of life and a sprinkle of more dark/epic moments; just in this case replace half of the slice of life stuff with a brand of fanservice that is much harder to ignore for many people.
To tell the truth the fanservice stuff on it's own bothers me more than it probably seems here in the defending position, but honestly I'm just a super big sucker for that particularly blended note of dark and epic that the various Fate (and some other Nasuverse) series manage to strike, plus Kaleid is still a recent enough show that you can get a bit of the epic fights going on (though obviously not to the extent of UBW) due to modern animation techniques/tech. So it's also kinda a case where the pluses from those moments help to counterbalance the cringe from others.
I mean it's definitely meh or worse in plenty of aspects, but if you're one of those people like me who has watched F/Z twice, UBW three times, and some of the semi-related other nasuverse stuff like Kara no Kyoukai (which is also an amazing set of films) or Tsukihime searching for that particular note of darkness and despair tinged with moments of epic, and you still crave a bit more, then you can certainly find it ringing out in Kaleid, albeit surrounded by a much different accompaniment than what it usually plays with.