I, don't know TBH. I read most of his stuff in my teens initially, but starting in the early 00's I read through everything again, including the short stories, which I think contain his best work.
A couple of things that struck me (and there's no claim to original or unobvious thought here), from crash onward he is basically rewriting the same book over and over - apart from his autobiographical digressions.
It seems clear that his protagonists are some kind of authorial surrogates. The rational professional, archetypal product of the west plunged into a confusing, unpredictable, yet strangely familiar and resonant world.
That we are meant to sympathise with these protagonists, the Ballardian everymen - an effect magnified by his exceptionally precise use of language, producing a kind of NLP like effect in the mind of the reader.
That this is Ballard revisiting his own trauma again and again, that plunge into chaos, the tearing apart of his world and his entry into a new realm with its own strange and inexplicable rules. The medium itself mirroring the narrative.