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It's the availability/filtering problem. First it was "some feature-length cartoon from Japan won a lot of awards worldwide, we should dub it for art hoes". Then it was "looks like cartoons are big in Japan, we can take the most popular series and dub them for kids. Wait, you think we can attract the teens as well? Noice!" Finally, we've reached the point where you can watch almost every release with fansubs or genAI subs.
And this means you finally have access to the full unfiltered range of formulaic slop that is made in Japan every year. Turns out it's just as bad on average as telenovelas or Saturday morning cartoons or horror movies.
It's the old "foreign prolefeed becomes high-status because consooming foreign product shows cosmopolitan sophistication" scam. In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.
In Japan, anime is slightly higher-status than Mickey Mouse because there is no animation age ghetto, but it is fundamentally mass-market TV. Sturgeon's law applies, and also the 10% that isn't crap is still passive entertainment for Japanese normies.
I remember seeing bus-stop ads in NYC ripping off this issue for beer in the late noughties. I don't remember who paid for them - the vibe is right for Yeungling but it may have been a generic Drink American ad by a trade association. There was a picture of two bottles of Stella Artois. One was captioned "The beer of the poor in Holland" (This is cuts even deeper than the target audience would have spotted - at 5.2% Stella has a relatively high ABV for mass market beer, so it is the beer of drunks and hooligans. In the UK at the time, it was called "beater" because it was said to be what you drank before beating your wife) and the other "$7 a bottle in the US" (or whatever a bottle of overpriced beer cost at the time).
Might have been Heineken, who also mocked Sam Adams ("Benedict Arnold Pittsburgh Lager") and some other beer they called "Grandpa's Old Fuzzy Ale". Or Newcastle, which has mocked Stella before. I don't recall Yeungling doing mocking ads.
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Isn’t the “beater” thing also a reference to “A Streetcar named Desire” where Marlon brando’s character screams “stelllla!” while wearing a tank top undershirt? (AKA, a wife beater.)
It is possible that it began that way, but I doubt it. The overlap between people who drank lager in the UK in the 1990s (the respectable working class still drank bitter, and the middle class drank wine) and the people who were familiar with vintage Marlon Brando movies, let alone Tennessee Williams plays, was not large. When I was introduced to the saying, there was no suggestion that the reference to wife beating was other than literal.
There was a straight-to-VHS remake of A Streetcar named Desire in 1995 starring Alec Baldwin, that might also be the source if it has the same scene in it.
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But Asterix is far more sophisticated than 50s Marvel ever was. (Of course, that says more about 50s Marvel than anything else. I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period.)
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