I feel like that's often part of it. Something that represents peak (whatever) in terms of a sound. The sort of highly-polished result that almost sounds like it was AI-generated by a model trained on exactly what was popular over the past few years.
Of course, you don't need AI to do it - just slightly more human and manual analysis of trends, sales, marketing, and production techniques.
The thing is though, they’re amazing musicians. Kip Winger is premiering another one of his classical works with the Nashville Symphony in the next few weeks. Reb Beach is one of the most skilled and melodic guitar players to come out of the 80s. They wrote and continue to write some great songs too if you like that kind of music.
Music snobbery is just silly, and robs you of the joy of discovering some great new music while simultaneously robbing others of it too. Everybody loses.
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.