Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've ever heard the story of how someone came to love storygames that didn't heavily involve a series of bad GMs in that person's past. It's like the genre's fans are mostly victims of bad actors.
Well, I'll only speak to myself here, but most of the folks you're talking to in this thread are overwhelmingly (to nearly exclusively) GMs. But before I get into my anecdote, I don't like the framing of all games that aren't Traditional as "Storygames." All of the games that would be captured under the "Storygames" umbrella include systems and agendas that diverge dramatically from one another. There are "Storygames" that verge toward "Writer's Rooms" in their process and play, there are others that verge toward "Player's Side Railroads" in their process and play, and then there are "Story Now" games that have a rather traditional authority/role model when it comes to situation framing and consequence handling, but diverge dramatically from Traditional games in key ways. These games are systemitized and play sufficiently differently that you can have a healthy conversation over whether these archetypes even evolved from a common ancestor.
Ok, my anecdote (which doesn't entail being burned by a series of bad GM's in my past):
* Starting running games at 7 years old in '84. Pawn Stance Dungeon Crawls exclusively. Full Gamism, challenge-based play. Did that for like 7 years including moving through Moldvay Basic to B/X to (reluctantly when I moved to Florida) AD&D 1e and supps.
* I watched, though did not participate in, many many games with 10 longterm Trad GMs from 1987 through 1994. Full-on Hickman Revolution GMs w/ a combination of GM-side manipulation of the gamestate to accomplish Sim veneer meets Storyteller imperatives. Massive use of GM Force to corral players into a metaplot thus putting them persistently in a passive/reactive state of play. Chicken or the egg if the players were passive participants first or if they were conditioned to be passive by the GM's deployment of techniques and opaque system. Regardless, a mixture of functional games and totally dysfunctional games. Really depended upon (a) how special the GM was in the performative aspects of play + the covert manipulation of gamestate + how good of a "tour guide" they were for the setting and metaplot + how capable they were at constructing metaplot/bread-crumbing/info-dumping via exposition and (b) how willing the players were to be passive consumers of the GM's work.
* RC comes out in early 90s and I spend the next half-decade running hexcrawls that were mostly Gamism. Not as Pawn-Stancey as the above, but in the neighborhood.
* Ran some Over the Edge and Everway in the mid 90s.
* Playtested 3.x FR due to one of my friends adoring the setting and he and a few others convinced me to run a Trad, Setting-Tourism, Metaplot-heavy 3.x FR game for 7 years starting with AD&D 2e in 1997 through about 2004 with 3.x when it came out in 99. I did not enjoy this is the most charitable way I can put this. The players enjoyed the game very much, but I did not (again...charitable).
* Early 2000s I ran a little Fate, a little bit of Burning Wheel, and then ran Dogs, Sorcerer, Shadows of Yesterday, My Life With Master, and Sorcerer when they came out. I ran a ton, ton, ton of Dogs in the Vineyard from 2004 to date.
* 2007 rolls around and the lead up to 4e D&D has me very, very excited. It looks to be combining the best of Gamism with Story Now tech. It comes out and doesn't disappoint. I loved it, I love it, I've run 2 games from 1-30, a few other games spanning Heroic Tier or Paragon Tier and have run several PBPs of 4e (including one presently).
* AW comes out and I run the hell out of that and several derivatives and at volume. I've run probably 10 PBtA games or so. They aren't all the same engine. Some are better than others. I'm just finishing a 16 month Stonetop game and I'm on session 5 of another Stonetop game.
* From early 10s through now I've run a ton of Cortex+, Strike (!), Mouse Guard, Torchbearer, Harper's games like Blades in the Dark (et al) and various and sundry other games that span that gamut of "Storygames" listed above. Too many to mention to be honest.
* Late 2016, I get requested to fill in for a rather flakey 5e GM who was running that same Hickman Revolution style game with their own setting and an elaborate metaplot. I get access to their notes and just wing it when I fill in. I try to breadcrumb/info dump to mainline the metaplot & setting-as-protagonist game they were running...but I just gave up and tried to make each session fun for these 13-16 year olds I was running games for. Waaaaaaay too much effort to ingest these plot points and GM Force shenigans to ensure them. If you don't want your story trajectory that you're imposing upon play to go awry....maybe reliably show up to run your game. So I let them figure out how to info dump/GM Force their metaplot back online when they ran their game. It actually kind of worked for them to be honest because they kids got this toggle of two very different games when I was running their 5e game vs when the primary GM was running it. So fair enough.
* My only play experience is a one-off Cthulu by a fantastic Railroading Cthulu GM. Total Cthulu Railroad and fantastic game. One-off Traveller game by a very good Traveller GM way back when. A pair of Story Now one-off games where I simultaneously tutored/played a PC to help a young girl run a Mouse Guard game and a 50 year old (who was brand new to TTRPGing but a few years before) run a Dungeon World game. Every one of those experiences was excellent. I might be forgetting one...but those come to mind. Oh yeah, a Dread game and a 10 Candles game that I co-GMed and ran a PC. Great games.
So no personal horror stories of being a player in a game for me. My very scant play experience has all been excellent whether its been a one-shot, total railroad or something else.
