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Not really - genuinely terrible-all-round stuff doesn't get popular. Harry Potter is known for not having great prose but good story, Fate Stay Night has terrible prose but good story, Higurashi had terrible art until they remade it (look it up if you're interested) but good story etc. I'm mostly pointing out that 'technical skill' is not a good indicator of popularity and therefore of 'goodness' by my lights beyond a base level.
By my own definition, I don't think something almost universally beloved can be bad. The idea that one can 'snooker' people into liking something that is actually bad seems like a confusion of terms to me. Of course, if one says something like, "Potter's plot is great, everyone loves the plot" then we are in a fully circular realm.
Did you read that one famous debate between architects where the Bauhaus guy basically said, "I love disharmony, I love that I can put it in the middle of the city, and if the vast majority of people find it uncomfortable that is their problem not mine"? On immigration, my brother has a genuine preference for both brutalist architecture and the parts of London that I find extremely culturally uncomfortable, he actively enjoys the strong non-Britishness of it all. I'm genuinely trying to take his expressed preferences and those of @Primaprimaprima and Ozy seriously and at face value.
I tried to be clear that I wasn't writing a polemic or positing a malevolent conspiracy, it's just that the people broadly in control of the culture genuinely have preferences that can't be publicly satisfied without making lots of other people unhappy as a side effect. There's other stuff going on, economics and technological changes and so on, but I believe that the taste incompatibility is a hugely understated influence on what has become the Culture War and it's why these questions have been bubbling up with increasing frequency lately. Scott's essays, the failed efforts by both the UK conservatives (Build Back Better) and Trump to enforce building styles that are popular against furious institutional resistance, and so on. I'll also say that the idea that much of this stuff arises from an unfortunate incompatibility is much, much more charitable than the position I held when I started thinking about this a decade ago.
I think perhaps we disagree about cause and effect. I think if something is universally popular, it's almost certainly because it's good. You seem to be arguing that popularity makes it good by definition.
This is probably true to some degree, if by "people broadly in control of the culture" you mean the Left, because pretty definitionally leftists want to change society, and that is going to upset lots of people. There might be a correlation between "likes brutalist architecture" and "likes immigration" but I am not convinced it's coming from the same place or that "upsets people/is bad" is its defining characteristic.
Perhaps I'm still not expressing myself well, but I would also ask you to read a little more charitably. I am not talking about 'the Left'. The Left is maybe 30%, 40% of society. It comprises people who believe in socialist economic theory, people who believe that social hierarchies need to be rejigged, unionists, feminists, ethnic minorities, all sorts of people who have a reason to want society to change in certain ways that they believe are good in general or good for them in particular. Lately it also includes a certain number of temperamental conservatives, because certain left-wing causes have been causes long enough to become the status quo, as in Scott's essay "Gay Rights are Civil Rites".
I am talking about a much smaller group of people, perhaps 5-10%, who seem to have tastes that are broadly anti-correlated with the majority of people. That does not mean that the defining characteristic of their tastes is "upsets people". I'm not really equipped to say what the defining characteristic of their tastes are, because I don't share them and I don't have the right equipment to pick up what they pick up. If you haven't, please do read Ozy's essay, where she explains her viewpoint much better than I can. Just in case, I will quote:
This cluster of people have, for the last hundred years or so, clustered on the Left and been disproportionately represented at the top of cultural institutions. They are clustered at the top of cultural institutions because their tastes have broadly become the marker of what culture is, and they have historically been clustered on the Left partly because 'changing things' is what you want to do when your aesthetics are unpopular and not established, and when you have a far-greater-than-normal hunger for novelty. Partly also because their aesthetics have generally dictated the aesthetics of the Left in the non-Soviet countries, and therefore the Left is the champion of their aesthetics. Chicken, egg; egg, chicken.
To some degree, the affiliation with the Left may change, because the Left has got rather more boring as it's got more powerful and more established, which is why you see some of the 'obligate edgy' like perhaps Walt Bismark moving to the alt-right. I don't think that will take, long term, but I don't know for sure.
The reason I bring up immigration is because there while are a lot of economic arguments and non-aesthetic on the pro- side, as someone who has spent a lot of time in university towns and known a lot of pro-immigration people, there is also a deep, fundamental hunger for new, different culture on your doorstep. Often this coincides with a boredom and a certain repulsion towards the culture of their birth. Take the recent Iran and Palestine rallies for example. I know some people who don't really express a strong opinion on the issues but they love that they're happening. It's historical! You can go and watch people shouting and yelling in Arabic and it's like being in a different country. So I note in various different fields a strong desire for alien-ness and I believe it's a very underappreciated driver of the cultural conflicts that have been happening over the last 100 years.
EDIT: just to quickly address your other point.
Yes. I don't think 'technical goodness' beyond a base level, as measured by technical experts, is very predictive of popularity. Indeed, I think in many areas it's smuggling popularity through a back door. What makes Harry Potter's plot so good? Well, the characters are written in a way that makes people care for them, and events are written in a way that excites people...
In something like poetry, where people supposedly have much finer sensibilities for technical skill, we find that the most lauded poets are generally considered execrable by the majority of people while Britain's favourite poem is 'If' by Kipling who is regarded by those in the know as a hack.
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