From what I know (most of which is from a todd in the shadows video) the main problem a lot of ppl had wasn’t that they were uniquely bad, but that they were completely omnipresent, like the benson boone of 00s rock (though I know even less abt him, pretty sure his success is just from the two music radio stations ppl still listen to and thousands of walmart playlists, neither of which I care abt lol)

The fact that they were in between AOR-derived rock for 40yo gnr fans and alt-rock for 20yo slipknot fans also meant that they got played on rock stations for both of them and got mercilessly derided by two notoriously easy-to-anger demographics at once for being on whatever their station was instead of the other’s

Two decades on if you make 5/10 music that can reasonably be classified under like 5 subgenres but not fully belong to any of them either it takes at least 4 yrs until a critical mass of ppl start getting openly tired of it (yes this is abt taylor swift)