So probably neither one of them had achieved much in the way of liberation from attachment to sensory pleasure (and the other four hindrances: hate, dullness, anxiety, and doubt) or the resulting cessation of suffering, which is the point of Buddhism.

So either Buddhism doesn't work or Kerouac and Watts sucked at it. That, in turn, means that they are not reliable sources for information about how to do Buddhism.

That might be okay if you read Kerouac and then go find guidance on the path from someone who really is liberated, assuming that's possible, but how do you as a novice layperson tell the difference between a liberated Zen master and a charlatan? If US seekers were good at it, Kerouac's and Watts's books wouldn't be the bestsellers in the category, they'd be eclipsed by somebody whose practice of Buddhism in their own life was actually successful and who had trustworthy, well-grounded insights to share. So you're likely to replicate the errors that led you to Kerouac in the first place by choosing someone like Richard Baker as your teacher. Then, instead of getting liberated from suffering, you just get sexually exploited.

In particular, Kerouac kind of glorifies living heedlessly, and it was precisely that heedlessness that caused his death. Also, it was Richard Baker's heedlessness that caused so much suffering to his students, leaving scars in the community around the San Francisco Zen Center that continue to cause suffering, almost 30 years after his departure. If you're looking for someone to give you permission to live heedlessly, to tell you that living heedlessly is the path to liberation from suffering, you are going to assiduously avoid anything resembling orthodox Buddhism, which says that heedlessness causes suffering.

It's kind of the opposite extreme, really: orthodox Buddhist doctrine is that you should do everything extremely carefully. And you can see this in Zen rock gardens, in the Japanese tea ceremony, in Thich Nhat Hanh's practice of singing a little verse to himself about washing his hands every time he washed his hands, in the absolute prohibition on drinking alcohol, and so on. As far as I can tell it's uniform across every branch of Buddhism.

I'm no expert, of course—obviously I'm no enlightened being or I wouldn't be posting in this cesspit of ill-will and ego. So my understanding of Buddhism should also be suspect. But there is at least somewhat less evidence that I have Buddhism entirely backwards than there is for Watts and Kerouac. Not only have I not died vomiting blood due to alcoholism, the only drug I'm addicted to is caffeine.

It's the same kind of problem we have with programming books, where incompetent fools like Herbert Schildt https://www.seebs.net/c/c_tcn4e.html outsell Kernighan & Ritchie in the "learning C" category, and where the whole methodology and architecture category is full of snake-oil salesmen who have never successfully written a large program.