Alas, as Clingo says, it's the way of the world nowadays. A media that hypes up the Premier League beyond all other clubs/leagues and perpetuating the myth that anything outside of that may as well not exist as it's clearly of inferior quality is dreadful... but kids (and many adults) get sucked into it, believing the Premier League is the be all and end all of football.
Personally I prefer the Championship and even Leagues, 1, 2 and below to the plastic product driven Premier League hype... even when we were there I didn't really enjoy it (and not just because of the results). Don't get me wrong, I was able to enjoy seeing some of the players that I saw (Eden Hazard coming on for Chelsea and completing changing the game against us sticks in my mind probably most of all) but overall it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to me if we are playing Liverpool or Lincoln, Man City or Macclesfield, I'm there to support my team, not get sucked into gawping at the likes of Haaland & Co and thinking they are some kind of footballing gods that matter more than say Joe Ralls for instance.
Us, you boys and even our own little cousins down the road generally have our hardcore of around 18k fans, a floating group of about 4-5k on top of that that will go to games if they have nothing better to do or things are going ok and then another 5k+ that will turn up for big games or when things are going REALLY well.
(Ok, for the little cousins it's more like 16k with 2-3k floating fans just die to their capacity constraints).
Many of these fans won't go to the lengths of buying the shirts and often,m even those that do often only wear them on match days. Regards the observations by the poster, the majority of our fans don't drink in town pre-game, preferring normally Canton or Grangetown for their beers given the location of the stadium.
Unless any of us get sustained top flight success then it won't change, but of course, if we do get sustained top flight success then our clubs become just as plastic as Man Utd, Citeh, Chelsea or Liverpool.... it's a sorry catch-22 and, as you can probably tell, a massive bugbear for me...