I'm not sure why would anyone like what Cadbury sells in the UK. Almost any European brand of chocolate is better than Cadbury, which is extremely sweet. I understand I may be biased not being British, but still.
I guess it's mainly that "better" is largely subjective and the people pitching bitter, high price, high cocoa bars usually have an axe to grind. Often they use various tricks to sell a tiny sliver of chocolate, using cardboard to hide how thin it is, fancy packaging to distract you and up market branding to make you feel better about it. Personally I'm fine with what market forces deliver - mainly UK focused bars with some variety for those who like to stand out for whatever reason. I'm glad that US chocolate doesn't generally take much of the UK market as it has a tendency to taste rancid to my palette (but again probably highly subjective, each to their own!)
Granted at the start, I'm in the US, so I'm not sure what it's like in the UK. Sure, there's plenty of Hershey/Cadbury type cheap (but often satisfying) stuff here, and plenty of expensive crap that's nothing but branding, and sounds like what you're describing.
But there's also a huge variety of high cocoa, low sugar bars available that are great tasting, not overly expensive, and not skimpy. Once you skip all the sugar and diary, the complexities of the cacao flavors come through so much stronger, and different chocolates can have very different flavor profiles. It's really a different product from the strongly sweetened chocolate bars. It's definitely true that chocolate snobbery is rampant, and its annoying (as you say, to each their own), but to dismiss the variety of dark, less sweet chocolates available as people having and axe to grind is a shame.
You are missing a wide range in between. I hate buttery fakeolat, I also am not interested in eating raw cacao beans (ie pure chocolate). Both are idiotic assaults on the tastebuds.
Never realized how good I had it in the Netherlands. The fakeolat is pretty rare (cheap, bottom of the barrel kid chocolat that no sane adult goes near) and the cacao purist I simply ignore.
Kinder Bueno is a good example of what I'm taking about. I know it has hazelnuts in. There's no bitter cocoa 'kick', just a sticky sweet taste. It's like chocolate for people who don't like the taste of chocolate.
Nutella is literally and explicitly hazelnut flavoured, there is a hint in the name. That is a terrible example; quite possibly the worst you could have used. I cannot emphasise enough how bad an example that is, and how much it implies that you haven’t done your research into this.
As for Milka and Kinder, they’re not exactly high quality brands. Milka is even owned by Mondelez, same as Cadbury. They are not indicative of the quality of most European chocolate (in the same way that Hershey’s is in no way indicative of the quality of
good American chocolatiers)
I’m confused with Lindt though. I’ve had plenty of
their dark chocolate, from barely above milk-chocolate to 99% cacao solids, and none of it has ever had a distinct hazelnut flavour. I have to seriously ask: are you sure you know what hazelnut tastes like?
> Nutella is literally and explicitly hazelnut flavoured
Given that (at least in the US) it isn't marketed as chocolate or a chocolate spread but as a “hazelnut spread with cocoa”, I’d say that's a bit of an understatement.
