1x04 K-Pop

That's an interesting low level description and insight into the origin, but not so much on the phenomenon itself.

In the beginning it refers to the band as "the Korean New Kids on the Block" as if it was a pejorative, but why ? That is exactly what this is.

The girl saying this is not cynical music is really ironic, it is a pure marketing product industrialized to maximize engagement and profit. The lyrics might not be, but the making of it couldn't be more cynical. And the "They are also very genuine" is off the charts funny.

This is exactly the boys band craze of the 90's. All the elements are there.

Interestingly it happened at about the same time initially, but the real interesting question would have been: why did the rest of the world quickly got over it and move on, and Korea did not ? Instead they pushed it to the extreme.

I can get it coming back in the rest of the world, it's aggressively marketed, and more than music it's a marketing + fashion product, so like fashion it goes out of style and comes back, and its younger public wasn't not exposed to the first domestic wave of this.

But why is this still a thing in Korea ? The government funding to export musical culture ? That would be pretty ironic since it initially was a reaction to state sponsored music.