Shadowrun's original setting is only a few decades in the future now 
and there was already the idea of NERPs ("New Exciting Retail Products" that caused explosions of consumerist violence a bit like the szechuan sauce riots some years back), so unless it was too uncomfortably close for my group or too on the nose, I was tempted to have a setting where a prevalent presence and potential threat was a bunch of affluent bazingas with combat drones that are scoring epic hero points for their battle passes and season passes and so on by remotely shooting undesirables (such as Shadowrunners) that are visually reskinned as zombies or whatever so they can be "just like in the treats."
If I wanted to go extra heavy on the meta-narrative the bazingas would themselves be fantasizing about being Shadowrunners while gunning down Shadowrunners, and they'd see Damien Knight (or the equivalent tech billionaire, though Damien really needs to catch up with actual contemporary billionaires for evil) as the "ultimate rebel" and the like.
Probably too heavy-handed, but might workshop it.
I know that feeling very well... and I admit that both of those possibilities you mentioned, and things already done with microwaves and even fucking neutron bombs are just waiting for a sufficiently imaginative monster to apply them.