I claim that it cannot be the taste, because the taste is clearly dominated by cheaper alternatives

I drink mostly water and sometimes fruit juice. On occasion, I buy atypically expensive alcoholic beverages, indistinguishable from other beverages of the type except in flavor and price, because I like their taste. How do you explain that?

Except that my other issue with alcohol is that, within a given drink class, I can't distinguish the taste very much. All beers, for example, taste to me like sourness and bitterness that stings as it goes down. To the extent that I do discern a difference, it's that some aren't as painful or gross to drink. And what really perplexes me is that the least bad, most tolerable beer I've found is ... Guiness.

(ETA: The sting of carbonated beverages also dominated my experience when I first tried them out, which is why I didn't regularly want them until I was about 10 and found one with enough of the right sweetness to outweigh the pain. Today, I still experience that sting.)

Ethanol is not pleasant to drink. It doesn't even have a flavor, per se, just a sharpness and the burning or stinging sensation. To appreciate the flavor of an alcoholic beverage, you must first acclimate yourself to being able to ignore the ethanol itself. Your experiences suggest that you are unable, or able only with difficulty, to become acclimated to this, and thus will likely never be able to perceive what other people are talking about.

The reason why it is worthwhile is twofold: the process of fermentation produces many complex flavors, and many flavors are far more soluble in alcohol than in water. The former provides, for instance, the complex malt flavor of dark beers, while the latter allows things like the woody flavors of a barrel-aged whiskey.

In both cases these flavors could be recreated chemically, but at great difficulty and expense, and the intersection of "people who enjoy experiencing complex, interesting flavors" and "people who actively prefer non-alcoholic beverages" is too small of a market to attract much attention.

As an aside, the vast majority of the market does drink alcohol primarily for intoxication or status, and cares little for flavor, so (at least in the USA) mass-market mainstream alcohols will always be designed to be boring and inoffensive, in order to maximize the market, thus tasting of little other than the ethanol that bothers you so.

If you want to give the whole thing another chance, I suggest finding a liquor store that caters to the beer nerd / microbrew enthusiast market and look for one of the following varieties: Belgian-style fruit lambic, Russian imperial stout, or American-style triple IPA. You probably still won't like them, but all three tend to be so strongly flavored (and in the latter case, extremely bitter) that it actually dominates the ethanol.