That's great, but it still means I can't have soft drinks any more.
It is "these taste like they're contaminated with antifreeze".
They taste like they've been intentionally adulterated with the stuff they use to stop people drinking poisonous things.
Personally though I think stevia might be the worst, and it's getting added to everything lately, even stuff with more than enough regular sugar.
Honestly I'd prefer to not taste that, since I think most probably are pretty safe and fine (though I would be glad to see a reduction in sweetness in general). But it's really not a choice, nor have I "gotten used to it" in 40 years, despite it being extremely common.
The main point is that it's not that X has an awful taste. It's that different people have different reactions to different Xs. It's not that X tastes bad unless you happen to get used to it.
Where are you that the only available soft drinks are artificially sweetened? Never been to a restaurant or fast food place or grocery store that only carried the diet/zero and didn't carry the standard coke or pepsi.
Like >90% of energy drinks use at least one (normal red bull is a rare exception), and diet sodas typically have more shelf space than regular from what I see, often by a huge margin.
Almost all gatorade-likes have it now too (I typically can't find even a single counter-example in a store, unless they're one of the oddballs carrying regular gatorade (most do not)), often also including regular sugars. Even stuff you'd hope would be maximally-simple like pedialyte has it in almost every variety.
Almost literally every single water-flavoring in stores uses them, I go years without seeing unsweetened or sugar only. skratchlabs.com is sometimes in expensive bike or running stores though, yay.
Stuff like Liquid Death used to be just low amounts of sugar, but now has stevia in it too. The same happened with Bragg's drinking vinegar(???!).
It's wild to be someone who dislikes the flavor of these things and read labels, and watch the massive rise in use in despair. They're in lots of candy bars now too! That was a rather nasty discovery.
All soft drinks are contaminated with artificial sweeteners.
