Im kinda that way with coffee. Eventually I switch to water but sometimes its the only thing I drink in the day.

In fact I think many people primarily drink something other than water. And im not saying thats good. But between pop, coffee, tea, juice, alcohol and an aversion to tap water, you have a lot of people who rarely drink water.

There's not a terribly high amount of caffeine in it anyway compared to coffee.

I feel seen

There's a big difference between "this causes cancer" and "this causes lots of cancer". IARC look at the quality of the evidence to put things into one of four groups. Some things definitely do cause cancer, but they don't cause very much cancer.

Don't forget that there are several multi-billion dollar companies who sell aspartame who are vigorously campaigning to promote the safety of their products. It's entirely unsurprising that the data is unclear when you have that level of interference in the research. It's also really tricky to do diet research on humans - we can't lock people up for a year to give them a controlled diet, so we end up asking them to write down what they've eaten and drunk. This means the data researchers have is pretty bad. Looking for a small signal in very noisy data is hard.

I didn't read it as a barb! There really are Diet Coke fiends. If you don't drink a lot of diet soda, the idea of drinking it to the exclusion of all other liquids might seem pretty wacky.