It completely drives me insane. The gaslighting is unhinged. You can like anime for many reasons. Only one, tiny, singular reason, is lolicon.
That is an interesting way to think but I don't agree at all.
Lolicon has always been entrenched into anime and anime is what made it popular in the first place (even if many/most anime fans don't like it). It's not hard to find a popular anime with some loli bullshit shoved in for fanservice reasons (for that particular crowd). Heck take a mainstream isekai light novel like Re:Zero (13m copies sold)... I just saw a screenshot of its latest season and yep, loli faggotry. I remember watching Bleach when I was a kid and while the author self-admittedly likes big titty adult women and milfs, he ended up designing a "1000-year old loli" character anyway (it's not in-your-face but it is there). Fuckin Boruto's author caught controversies for drawing one of the main kids with a sexual design. Not to mention there's highly acclaimed anime like Monogatari (2m BDs sold) where the protagonist is a bona fide pedophile, no pretenses.
I'm not surprised to see so many weebs feeling the need to defend Japanese media in this thread (considering KF demographics) but let's not kid ourselves. Remember Nobuhiro Watsuki? This guy, who wrote Ruroni Kenshin (which is a best seller), was caught with so much CP that authorities thought he was a distributor but still managed to get away with a
$2000 fine. Many popular manga authors including the likes of Jujutsu Kaisen and Hunter x Hunter participated in his manga anniversary event with literally just a handful silently boycotting it. Oda, the author of One Piece, even commented that the guy was an "amazing person". And this is just one guy, one case.
You can love anime, other Japanese media and Japanese culture to death while not even remotely liking lolicon but let's not get delusional here and attempt to obfuscate the root of the issue. Many here including the OP and Null have already gone over the sexual dysfunction within Japanese culture and how it feeds into perverse things like lolicon.