While I have no doubt Snarf meant it light heartedly. The theme has been picked up and repeated over and over again, that D&D isn’t very good and is popular for other reasons. Said with absolute seriousness.
There are obviously a wide slew of factors at play that don't necessarily involve the quality of the product itself. Even if we say, for example, that Coca-Cola tastes great and is a great product, that alone can't explain its popularity, which also has to do with timing, market/business choices, potentially shady under-dealings (e.g., assassination of Columbian union leaders), brand recognition, nostalgia, etc. It's incredibly important, IMHO, to recognize that
ad populum is not indicative of product quality. If you like the product, then great, but it's important sometimes to be thankful that the product had the history, luck, and other factors that it did to get it to (and keep it at) the top spot for so long.
I think that D&D 5e is a great sufficiently good enough game. It's oriented towards a certain type of play (2e-3e-PF1 adventure path play with a focus on tactical skirmishing combat), which is great for that, which you have indicated is your primary mode of play, but it's mostly "okay" to "poor" for others (e.g., old school skilled play, wilderness/exploration-based hex crawling, gold with a purpose, PC protagonist-driven play, etc.). To be clear, it's not necessarily a matter of whether you could do these things with 5e, but also how well and actively these other types of game play are supported.
As a lot of mainstream play has moved away from Old School play towards more GM/Publisher curated adventures and styles of play, 5e delivers that quite marvelously. As 5e serves your purposes exceedingly well, I think you may have a potential blind spot about some of its rough spots or its lack of support in other areas of the game. There are a number of people on this forum, for example, who have not played pre-2e editions of D&D who are only now playing Old School Essentials and other OSR games that provide a different gaming experience than what 5e D&D provides. 5e doesn't have to be a great game at everything in order to be a great overall product.
Okay, but the mode isn’t either 4 or 5, it is 5 by a landslide. They overwhelmingly rate it the highest ranking they can give it. 89% that is a massive vote of confidence. Dungeon World has 80% of people giving it 5 stars by comparison.
Friendly word of advice: Don't make this into a pissing contest.