A tweak suggested by YouTuber Nando v Movies sounded like an improvement for me, and I'm adding a few more tweaks:
1. The series starts with no Flag Smashers, just Karli Morgenthau, a former criminal associate of the Power Broker who stole doses of super soldier serum, took one for herself, and snuck back to Europe to try to help people she knew who are now refugees. The first episode ends with her robbing a bank, and getting filmed hurling a security guard fifteen feet, so that he smashes into a flagpole, which shatters, dropping a flag into a fire. She sees people recording her, and says this money is for refugees, and that the world should have no borders. This catches the public's attention because she's a Robin Hood figure, and gets Sam's attention because she's maybe a super soldier.
2. In episode two she gets more allies as people flock to her cause, and they try to hijack some vaccines in transit, and one of her allies is recording the heist, intending to release it later for propaganda and recruitment. They're actually thwarted in getting the vaccines, and some of her new allies get captured by John Walker, but Karli and the rest escape, and the video shows her kicking butt, and shows Cap and company trying to keep vaccines out of the hands of those who need them. At the end of the episode, after Sam and Bucky go meet Isaiah Bradley, we see Karli give doses of the super soldier serum to some of the members of her team.
3. Ep three opens with the newly super-soldiered flag smashers breaking into a jail to rescue their teammates who were arrested, and one of them kills a guard. Karli admonishes him, saying that they're not killers. Again, all of this is streamed and shared online. The evidence that there are now multiple super soldiers makes this urgent, and drives Bucky and Sam to get Zemo released to help them find the source. The rest of the episode is basically the same.
4. Ep four is very similar, including the scene with Karli and Sam talking, only to have Walker ruin everything. The big change in this ep is that in the climax, the same reckless super-soldier flag smasher who killed someone last episode kills Lamar . . . and this time the person John Walker kills is Karli, again, all filmed and shared online.
5. Small change to ep five. The leaderless flag smashers are thus driven to be more radical and violent, and in the end the Power Broker sends Batroc to recruit them for a terror attack on the GRC. Sharon tips off the authorities, saying she intercepted the Power Broker's message to Batroc. (This, we'll discover later, was to help her get back into a useful position in the CIA. If some violence leads to more instability and demand for the weapons she sells, all the better.)
6. If you want to be really on the nose, you have the Flag Smashers kidnap the GRC, load them on helicopters, and fly them to Liberty Island, to execute them in front of the inscription of the Emma Lazarus poem, the New Colossus. As usual, they're recording, only once they have the hostages, they start livestreaming. Sam can fight Batroc, and Bucky deals with other super soldiers (with John Walker not getting any sort of moment of redemption; he just doesn't show up except in the epilogue). Then when the choppers fly, Sam can do the same trick where he kicks a guy out and then has a hostage take over flying; but one of the choppers makes it to Liberty Island.
And that's when Sam lands and talks the situation through, winning by deescalating the situation. Some other helicopters are around, with tactical teams - and with Bucky, with a rifle, ready to kill the flag smashers but hoping he doesn't have to. And Sam gets them to trust him by speaking to the politicians, explaining that millions of people agreed with Karli, and that the GRC's plan is just going to radicalize more people, but that they could instead use their power to help these people. Then with that trust he persuades the flag smashers to surrender.
