People love to hate on hypebeast trends. When something becomes suddenly popular, there's a scramble to declare yourself too cool to be into it :P The whole cycle is amusing because defining yourself in opposition to the zeitgeist... actually is just another form of letting the zeitgeist define you. (Which I don't think is a bad thing, necessarily, but people who e.g. complain about Taylor Swift do think it is.)

Being confused about why a particular thing is popular is a far cry from hating that thing. It's just not understanding the appeal.

I'm not surprised people are confused. They probably know what happened with Beanie Babies 20+ years ago and see Labubu has the same thing. Except now the trends or shorter and more frequent. Labubu is one of many such little collectables that aims to trigger rampant consumerism.

If someone were to tour my house and poke around, they would likely conclude that I have collections of watches and shoes. I would never call either of these things collections. They are just things I wear that I like and finding ones I like leads me to trying out a lot of them.

I generally have an issue understanding most people who spend thousands of dollars on "collectibles", where the only apparently purpose is to buy it and stick it on a shelf.

I did have a couple Beanie Babies during that craze, since my mom was always at the store looking at them and buying them. I treated them like normal stuffed animals, and did end up making 100x by selling one of them, but that was never my intent when I got it. It was dumb luck that it was rare. I found all of that very confusing.