I mean I could go into any anime themed shop and within milliseconds I could find images of schoolgirls flashing their underwear. I've been to Akihabara in Tokyo a bunch of times and the weird horny aspects of the scene comingle everywhere. Like to the point I would not go to Akihabara if I took family to Japan. And I mean it's definitely gotten more mainstream in the past 15 years like with Persona being massively popular, anime like MHA and Demon Slayer. But to people who are still outside to the scene they're still gonna see weird sexualized stuff very quickly.

That's something very endemic to anime/manga and it's a massive barrier for a lot of very reasonable people. And yeah there's probably a lot of unfounded sentiment where they unfairly dismiss the entire aesthetic as cringe and childish, but there's a lot of reasonable people who are turned away by the frankly weird horny vibes and I simply can't blame them.