Agreed, although I'll add a few things. Protein has a much higher thermic effect of food (TEF), meaning your body expends more energy processing it. Protein and carbs both contain around 4 calories/gram and fat around 9, but TEF is roughly 20–30% for protein, 5–10% for carbs and 0–3% for fat. In other words, your body burns roughly that percentage of the calories from each just processing them.

More importantly, protein supplies the amino acids your body needs to maintain and rebuild muscle; carbs can't substitute for the essential amino acids you have to get from your diet. That's particularly useful during a caloric deficit, when you're trying to lose fat while preserving muscle, and as you get older and age-related muscle loss becomes a concern.

Protein also tends to be more satiating than carbs or fat and affects appetite hormones like ghrelin, GLP-1 and CCK. So while there's no magic number of calories that adding protein will make you eat less, the evidence supports protein making it easier to feel satisfied on fewer calories.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32768415/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8878356/

So protein helps you maintain muscle, makes you feel fuller per calorie, and costs your body more energy to process. There are pretty good reasons people trying to lose fat, build/maintain muscle, or stay healthy as they age to seek out higher-protein foods. The marketing obsession didn't come out of nowhere, even if companies take advantage of it by plastering the protein content across the front of the package while leaving things like carbs, saturated fat, and total calories much less prominent.

It’s a weird obsession because people are trying to eat significantly more than they need.

People misunderstood grams per kilogram and just switched it to grams per pound without actually converting units

If you want to be muscular, then you need to eat a lot of protein

But dumbasses think protein is only in meat. Internet thinks protein = meat.

https://www.greatveganathletes.com/athletes/sport/bodybuilders/

And let's just ignore colon cancer rates in <30 coincident with the protein fad.

If you're old and want to slow down how quickly your muscles waste away to maintain your physical health, you need to eat a lot of protein.

Btw, high protein intake lets you age quickly.

If you want to be muscular, then you need to eat a lot of protein.

This statement is not supported by science. There are no shortcuts, if you want big muscles you have to exercise more.