People are so brainwashed. Case in point: popular/hyped up soda and drink brands

Something that boggles my mind is how people will swear by a food item that has degraded in quality over time or tastes like crap, based on marketing, hype or familiarity alone.

For example, Mountain Dew and Pepsi. PepsiCo dramatically changed the formula for both a few years ago to the point where they're much worse than the cheap dollar store knockoffs. They literally taste like soap and/or other chemicals: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/food/pepsico.html?page=4#sort=recent&filter=none. Yet there are all these people on YouTube and other sites chugging both products crazy because of all of this flashy marketing and corny product lines like "Code Red."

Or what about the cookies and cream Twix? There are people raving that it's the best thing they've ever had and tastes just like the original that came out decades ago, but it doesn't taste anything like it. Not only that, it tastes like and has the consistency of flavored wax because of low quality ingredients. But people are swearing by it.

And then there's hipster crap like kombucha and Jones Soda. Jones Soda literally tastes like those experiments I used to do as a kid when I tried making my own soda by mixing juice powder and seltzer water. Kombucha tastes just as cheap, just seltzer with a little God-knows-what mixed in. But people are like, "Ohhh, this stuff is amazing!"

Are people this taken with marketing and branding that they can't even taste how poor quality an item is or has become over time?