I always look at the ingredients list of bread in the US and I am always surprised how long the list is. Why do they put so much stuff (and always sugar or syrup) into any bread?
This changes many of the properties of the bread and the long-term effects of this change aren't well understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
No knead bread is really easy to make, low effort, ridiculously cheap and able to fit into a busy lifestyle. It uses long fermentation with yeast to rise and condition the dough. I use this recipe: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/03/basic-no-knead-b...
There's not a lot of regulations for health and safety around most ingredients, so I'd say that also plays:
Fewer risks of decay and such
As to the length, for example the ingredient list of wonderbread from [0]:
unbleached enriched flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin,
folic acid), water, high fructose corn syrup, yeast, contains 2% or less of each of the following: calcium carbonate,
soybean oil, wheat gluten, salt, dough conditioners (contains one or more of the following:
sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium stearoyl lactylate, monoglycerides, mono- and diglycerides, azodicarbonamide,
enzymes, ascorbic acid), vinegar, monocalcium phosphate, yeast extract, modified corn starch, sucrose, sugar, soy lecithin,
cholecalciferol (vitamin d3), soy flour, ammonium sulfate, calcium sulfate, calcium propionate (to retard spoilage).
As far as what is actually needed to make the white bread, for the white bread I bake on occasion all that is used is flour, sugar, gluten, oil, yeast and salt in order of volume. Note however that this bread will only last a few days; and ideally will be consumed the same day as baking.
[0] https://www.fooducate.com/product/Wonder%20Classic%20White%2...
You don't need added sugar. Flour contains amylases which break down some of the starch in the dough to maltose and glucose, which is more than enough for the yeast.
The bread we eat only contains flour, yeast, salt and water. It's delicious in the first day and still nice on the second; after that, we toast it.
And these are just iron and b-complex vitamins, the "enriched" part of enriched flour.
Usually, whenever you see sugar added where it is not necessary, it's because fat or salt was removed from the recipe, to "improve" the numbers on the nutrition panel. And then you have to add the fat and salt back in yourself later, with butter or mayo or something.
You can't reliably and conveniently get "good" bread in the US unless you own a bread machine, and even then you have to pick out your flour carefully. I knew someone that had a grain mill attachment for their electric mixer, so they could make their own whole-grain flours, and be able to trust that they were what they appeared to be. Eventually, that became too inconvenient, and they just stopped eating bread altogether.
Or live near a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. They're not that unusual.
The point is that for loaf bread, a staple food for much of civilization, you have to go out of your way and make a special effort in the US to find something of similar quality to that which is the default at food merchants in other parts of the world.
As I don't have a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods anywhere near me, I can't speak to the quality of their bread offerings. At Kroger or Publix or Piggly Wiggly or Target or Wal-mart, the bagged & sliced bread quality is so far below the basic-recipe bread machine loaf that the only reasonable use case for it is to make sandwiches, where the purpose of the bread is to have a neutral flavor, and keep the other ingredients together and off your hands--a task which might still be better suited to a tortilla or cabbage leaves.
Ezekiel bread suffers from the "lifestyle aisle" problem at most grocery stores. To the store management, it isn't a "bread" as much as it is "alt-healthy lifestyle food". You don't even know it's there, unless you happen to notice it in the fridges next to the kombucha, kefir, cage-free barn-free pastured free-range eggs, and organic juice brands. If you were shopping for "bread", you would probably miss it, because it's nowhere near the bakery or the other breads. So "normal" people don't buy it, and then the store drops it from lack of sales.
Homemade bread is always going to taste better, of course.
Sounds like you're addicted to salt. Have you tried food without salt? After couple of weeks your taste buds adapt and you can actually taste the food.