Why does everyone equate music with ultra commercialized crap? Why ignore the underground and alternative scenes? There is a fuck ton of alternative underground music and art. It's not hard to find.

That's kind of the point though. There are a ton of alternative underground music and art, but it's not popular and it's even less popular outside of the various countries from which it originates.

The same is true of Chinese culture. China has an unbelievably diverse range of music, film, theater, etc... but what gets exported to a Western audience is not going to be things like Beijing's underground punk and experimental noise scenes, Chinese shoegaze, Sichuan and Yunnan folk music, Mongolian throat-singing fused with metal, dozens of completely different regional opera traditions, underground queer cinema, or Sichuanese rap.

Westerners will mostly get the small slice of Chinese culture that is easiest to export, translate, market, and fit into familiar expectations about what "Chinese culture" is supposed to look like.

Because we have a push-based knowledge culture that encompasses only what someone is willing to pay an advertisement channel to tell you.