I like to actually concentrate on the animation rather than splitting my attention between it and text. Since I don’t speak Japanese I get absolutely nothing out of the Japanese audio voices such as the importance of inflictions in dialog. I’d rather hear a language I understand so that I can understand performances. I’ll only chose a sub if the english dub is outstandingly bad, but in most cases I find the dubs perfectly fine.
I think that while some non-Japanese speakers genuinely prefer the Japanese audio, I suspect there is a large group who only claim to prefer it for performative reasons or people who stay quiet because they know if they voice an opinion preferring dubs they’ll get dogpiled by the rest of the fandom.
If we press play and it auto picks English audio the entire room starts searching for the remote.
Maybe it’s what we watch, but English dubs are jank. Compared to the original audio they sound flat and amateur.
Because it’s an afterthought. Imagine going to see a painting, but then the venue owner coming up and being like "my favorite color is blue, so all the red is going to get repainted over as blue.
The production wanted and worked and casted and directed and mixed and timed and animated all of the audio and people and visual together., and some asshole comes along and is just like “fuck all of this, people don’t want that, replace it with my buddies on staff that are cheap. We’ve been doing it for years, the dummies won’t notice”.
And to address the subject of why subtitling is different from that, it’s not entirely so. Subtitling is just less destructive.