That was generally my recollection from my teenage viewing, though maybe without the clause, "one of the most". I decided to re-watch it recently to see if I missed something as a teenager and my opinion of it would drastically as an adult, like it did with The Exorcist.

And... it left me just as emotionally indifferent this time around as before.

I could create an intellectual argument that after being interested in mob figures in the past, Scorsese was interested in really capturing what the life of someone who joined the mob in reality. Such a character turns out to be a major hanger-on, with no sense of internal reflection. This gives us an unreliable narrator, where what we see on screen undermines what our narrator says. And the movie needs to be entertaining to capture how it would seem appealing, and in what way, to someone.

However, this still ultimately ends up lacking any sense of interiority and other movies that are interested in that lack of interiority, manage to convey it in their style or presentation, highlighting it more, creating a tension there, so that attempt to make the film entertaining deflates that angle, IMO. I think it's not surprising that many people point to the voiceover from Karen Hill, because she's the only who actively interrogates why this lifestyle would seem appealing against most people's natural instincts who wouldn't be attached to the mob lifestyle.

I think my personally preferred mob films are Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Mikey and Nicky, but of Scorsese's mob and mob-related films, yeah, Mean Streets for me as well. Admittedly not seen Casino and probably a few others.