DFW, litbros, and the perils of fusing one's identity with what you consume

I wanted to make a post about the phenomenon of litbro discourse, that genre of article or reddit comment or booktok mocking a stereotype of a particular kind of reader. In this case, the reader is usually a male grad student obsessed with DFW, who I can assume assails his neighbors with unwanted monologues on the merits of Infinite Jest. I'm personally dubious that there are great hordes of DFW bros roaming grad programs anymore, and if they ever did exist, that they numbered more than a few dozen or hundred. But even if there was or is a huge population of bro-y DFW fans, I think there's a more concerning thread I'd like to tug at underneath all this: the insinuation that you should not read a certain kind of book to avoid being seen as a certain kind of person.

I think this is really unfortunate and amounts to a form of intellectual or literary pusillanimity. I think there is no shortcut for meaningfully weighing the merits of a work or writer short of actually reading that writer, critically. I can respect someone who roasts DFW on the basis of what he's written. I can't respect someone who snarkily dismisses his work based on an anecdotal encounter with a single obnoxious fan.

We live in an era where people fill the hole religious, cultural or ethnic identity used to fill with quite shallow replacements. I suspect this whole discourse is a function of folks identifying a bit too closely with the identity of being a "reader", of believing that the books we admire substantially comprise who we are. I love books, I love literature, and my life has been shaped by great writers like Tolstoy, George Eliot, and others -- but I am not my consumption of those works.

I could be way off base here, and I invite comments if people have any.