1.) This discourse, as most on the internet, is heavily contaminated by dishonest actors and unworthy opinions: salespeople; reviewers, with financial ties to manufacturers or those, who have made a career of their professed golden ears and are threatened by measurement based approaches for which they lack the skill/education or money; interested people, who spread noise without even having listened to a piece of equipment or without a sufficient and known baseline of comparison; etc.
2.) The entirety of audiophile products is heavily based upon consumerism. Its capitalist production and marketing creating and fueling desires for accumulation of stuff by linking that stuff to 1.) supposedly noble(r) values such as the enjoyment of arts and craftsmanship and 2.) self-expression and individuation through the choice of equipment. There are strong psychological forces at work here, preventing people from taking a sober look at the physical realities. Lots of people will go as far as to name audiophilia a *hobby* of theirs - something that is utterly passive and predicated on the continued accumulation of more stuff.
3.) The loudpeaker-listening position- room interaction is such a dominant factor that similarly measuring equipment will producy very different sound in different settings, thus accounting to a degree for the variability of opinions on given equipment and the downplaying of measurements as a basis for equipment choice.
4.) I suspect that the effects our brain and our conditioning have on the phenomenological/our listening sensations are far greater than assumed. I would not be surprised to find, that our brains correct for room acoustics and thus "assume" a certain sound to be correct, even if measurements disagree. (If, for example, we are accustomed to a heavily dampened room and our brain corrects our audio perception accordingly, hifi playback that has been dsp-corrected to boost high frequencies might cause a kind of sound/room "dissonance" or "over-correction". I think its even worse for dsp-corrected in-ear headphones that "correct" for the individual ear when our brains and expectations of 'normal/proper sound' have developed over a life-time with that individual ear structure.