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Notes -
Well, let's put it this way.
Most kinds of meal and by extension every ingredient has some kind of unpleasant taste to it. Sometimes, I plan meals based on what unpleasant taste I'm OK with submitting to on that particular night, and if the only things I have in my fridge are or add up to that, I go out for a burger or tendies instead if I have the opportunity to do so. (This can also happen with scents, and maybe a more extreme pickiness is created when the two are combined- though scents usually prompt initial aversion.)
Some of these ingredients have worse tastes than others, or those tastes are stronger in some people (insert "kids hate brussel sprouts" meme here, which I've always found pretty weird- though a good chunk of this is just parents being shit at cooking and just forgetting about certain things because they haven't eaten anything truly new in 20 years: he's not resisting the food to be difficult, he's resisting the food because it smells terrible right when you open the box and you forgot that matters).
I believe most people experience this with intentionally bad-tasting things- beer's the best example, because they're all bitter and awful as an inherent property of being beer. But it's the kind of unpleasantness, or the unpleasantness you are actively tolerating for other reasons, that makes it a viable beverage. Coffee is the same way, to a point- the reason people put cream and sugar in it is because they aren't actually in it for the coffee taste, they're doing it for other reasons. It's a coffee-flavored warm milkshake at that point, and I like milkshakes because they're milkshakes, not because they're coffee-flavored. (Most specialty coffee is absurd to me for this reason: because a lot of it is made to express the coffee flavor, and that flavor is bad- otherwise you wouldn't have to add sugar and cream and chocolate to it- so why would I want to spend 5 dollars on that when I can just get the cheap drip coffee and season it to the coffee-flavored-warm-milkshake taste that I actually wanted in the first place?)
The exception to those things are so-called "hyper palatable" foods. Your burgers, your tendies, your toaster pastries. There are very few distinct or recognizable ingredients in them, and so the possible space of undesirable tastes and textures is minimized (and in the case of processed foods this is either intentional or an emergent property in their development)- except perhaps for the store-bought frozen ones. Those are all turbo-garbage and they aren't even any cheaper; I don't know why anyone buys those outside of something their kid can prepare on their own when required. The frozen pizzas are like that too.
Take Doritos, for instance: it's a corn chip with good-tasting stuff on it. Or a McDonald's cheeseburger: it's [homogenized] beef, a slice of [homogenized] cheese, mustard and ketchup (both highly consistent mass produced substances), and maybe a bit of pickle (whose method of preparation is consistent and results in a taste that dominates what the cucumber originally may have tasted like). Pizza does that, tendies do that (bonus points for being a sauce-delivery mechanism; also, the McDonald's Szechuan sauce actually was as good as the meme suggested), toaster pastries do that, PB&J does that (though this kind of sandwich is actually really unpleasant to eat).
Contrast that with, say, a fancier curry (not the Glico stuff): you have all the ingredients in the sauce (including the fish sauce, ugh), the peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. You get a larger cross-section over which taste can go wrong (and... if you don't put those things in, it's just not curry) and it stinks up your kitchen something fierce because that's just what garum-based cuisine does (actually, lots of stuff does this- roast beef in particular is fucking awful for this; I can't begin to count the number of times I'd get home from school and smell that in the oven, but because it would take time between the 'oven's on, something's cooking' signal and the 'this is roast beef, not cookies' signal it'd be a cocktease 100% of the time).
I suspect this is heritable; my folks cook the absolute shit out of everything they make (everything's gotta be well done) and don't appear to actively enjoy eating what they make, but what they do make other than that are very simple 3-ingredient casseroles (or meatballs, or what they call chili) that take the form of what I described above. Of course, that's also very vulnerable to low-quality ingredients or the mix being wrong, and if one of the ingredients is changed then you literally can't make it any more.
On the rare occasions I cook, I also depend 100% on recipes. I can't "season to taste" when I don't know what it's even supposed to taste like, or if I do that, one of the ingredients on its own tastes bad anyway/once you can taste it, it's too late to season it; it doesn't help that I'm constitutionally incapable of chopping things in a way that doesn't mash them to bits (nobody else has a problem with this).
So if you're in control of what you eat, and you can spend 10 bucks on one of those store-bought BBQ chickens or get tendies instead, I'll take the tendies every single fucking time, because those chickens tend to be dry, under-seasoned, slimy, and you have to take them apart to eat them- why the absolute fuck would I take the effort to do that, or expect anyone else to, when the tendies are strictly superior 100% of the time if I'm in the mood for chicken?
Maybe it's learned helplessness; maybe if I did meal prep for the same meal 10 times and recorded exactly what I did, I could gradient descent my way into the tastiest possible version of a dish 100% of the time (which I think is what those meals-in-a-box promise, but they don't advertise that fact- the reason I don't want to cook is because it takes a half hour to chop everything and the produce I'd have to buy is always sub-par at best, which those services do not solve). But I don't think that's worth the cost or effort because that would take me literally all day and I can just go out for a fucking burger instead- maybe when I can no longer do that I'll consider it, or I'll be making food for my [hopefully future] wife and I can at least customize or appreciate it for that reason instead.
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