I think you are presenting a rose colored view of "choosing freely" the vast majority of people go along with signals they get along the way and those signals are always(?) inaccurate and arbitrary biases from older people considering past generations in largely irrelevant environments, etc.

I think quite a few people get pushed around by arbitrary sentiments until they find what they like and quite a few people don't really find anything because no one pushed them in any direction so they never really had the opportunity to learn to critique anything and develop their own opinions.