There is creativity and risk in anime that no western media company would ever touch, even if its disagreeable or just shitty. Western stuff is cookie cutter slop aimed at checking all the boxes of a profitable product.

Western media seems to only push things that fit the mold of an investor worthy price of art. Anime goes for a "throw things at the wall" approach so things that are a gamble get made. I think its an issue of scale, anime has a smaller market so the stakes of fucking up massively are survivable while having a huge farm of original indy stories dreaming of being an anime to source from. Western stuff dose not not have the pool of creativity to lift from as scaring or offending investors with risk gets you fired. Triple A gaming seems to reached the same point, bureaucracy and safety prevents new ideas that are risky or they come out bland and boring. Without risk you stagnate and people think your boring. Animation is cheap enough to take risk but has less returns since the market is smaller.

TL;DR: Western media is too bloated to take the creative risk needed and they got to throw buckets of cash to prop up Ol'Reliable season 20 instead.

Is it more popular? Are you sure you're not just making an assumption based on your anecdotal experiences?

A large part of it is the target audience.

Like western (or at least, American,) animation is mostly intended for children (Disney animation, Pixar. Paw patrol… looney toons,) or is of one of two genres (dc/marvel superhero’s, or like Family guy, South Park, simpsons.)

A lot of anime is intended for kids, too, don’t get me wrong. But a lot of it is also very much not. You also have a much broader array of genres, as well as a much broader distinctions in style in them.

The sheer volume and variety of anime and manga is why it has such a reach

There’s only about a dozen things that always pop up when you mention western animations, regardless of the genre or target audience

Why? My personal guess is that it costs too much/doesn’t generate a lot of profit and that due to that, series don’t build on top of each other like they do in Korea or Japan

Example off the top of my head, Korea has a lot of “awakened player” stories like Solo Leveling, the anime of which you may have seen recently; those stories are good because they keep building off of each other, eliminating the boring tidbits and coming up with more creative ways for the stuff that is interesting, and more importantly, its current, not 10 years ago, not 20, they refine the genre every season and it gets incrementally better, something that has simply not been happening in the west for a good long while now.

I would argue that Western animation is more popular as anime, it is just different.

The largest media company in the USA started as an animation company and animation is at the core of the company's identity.

After the Simpsons proved that prime time animation was profitable, there has been a resurgence in adult animation. There are several Western adult animated shows that are known as much as anime.

The eighth (Inside Out 2), fourteenth (Frozen II), and seventeenth (The Super Mario Bros Movie) top grossing films of all time are animated movies made by American companies. Moreso, the seventeenth movie uses Japanese IP but is made by Americans.

I'd argue that the main reason you see more anime is the target audience.

Western animation is usually aimed at young children. For as much as I may have loved Disney's Gummi Bears as a young child (decades later and I can still hear the theme song on my head), it's now pretty painful to watch. Some shows have aged pretty well and some newer shows aren't quite so bad. But, the target audience still seems to be younger children for much of it. There are exceptions, and several of those are pretty well known. For example, The Simpsons and Futurama are both popular animated shows, and both are not aimed at children.

Anime, by contrast is often aimed at teenagers. This means that it's part of the audience's formative years. People form bonds with the shows and carry some of those bonds into adulthood. And while the writing often falls into cringe inducing melodrama, there's enough of it that is passable fun, usually simple hero stories. The shows can be like a comfy blanket that doesn't insult the audience's intelligence too much.

I'd also note that anime's appeal goes back further than the 2000's. My own introduction was Robotech, back in the 80's. While it was a bastardized version of Macross, with some pretty awful writing (not that Macross's writing is going to win awards any time soon) and a couple other shows, it was certainly a step above what most western studios were putting on for Saturday Morning cartoons. And that created a lifelong soft spot for anime. Heck, my desktop background is currently a Veritech Fighter. I still love the idea of Robotech, even if I only watch it in my memory through very heavily rose tinted glasses. And I imagine I'm not alone. The show may be different, but I suspect a lot of folks graduated from Disney and Hanna-Barbera cartoons to some type of anime as they got older and that anime was stuck with them.

It's been over 40 years that Japan has been massively exporting anime to the west.
People under 50 yo grew up watching Dragon-ball, Sailor-Moon, Naruto or one piece rather than Superman/batman

There's a huge range, but the anime that gets popular tends to have vastly better writing than most western cartoons. There's still a stigma against animation as a legitimate adult art form, so it's rare that even good western animation gets properly recognized.

That said DC does have a good animation team, but they don't really advertise their releases much or make them easy to see outside Max. Netflix has probably been the best for western animation in the last decade, but they generally go very raunchy and it's a turn off for some.

Comics have always been campy to me. Anime when I grew up felt like a new direction. It did gritty before gritty was cool. The entire aesthetic was new and creative.

The music overshadowed anything western animation (at the time) had. I think the cultural impact made waves and western animation is pretty good now.

Although I consider the two things to be very different.

Ease of access, for one.

Aside from many being made for people over the age of 12, most animes have a story and an ending. It's nice getting something that's complete. X-men are awesome, but how many comic years was it before the end of their story? How much fluff is in there?

Western world creates a concept and milks it for as long as it can make a dollar. Japan does some of that too, for sure. Luffy may never end. But many other times they go into it to tell a story, get it done, and that's it. Complete show. NGE was a single season. FMA was 2 seasons. Cowboy Bebop was just one season.

Tiddies

people have been trying to figure out why kids like the things they like for many decades, ever since they became their own demographic. the only reasonable conclusion i've heard is kids like what their friends like, and tend to move away from what their parents liked (superman). why do they latch on to some things and not others?- who tf knows

best advice is to not waste time trying to figure it out

It's just that you'd think say, Superman would be more stupidly popular since everyone knows who he is than someone such as Lelouch from Code Geass.

I would say Superman is more popular.
After all, everyone knows who he is.