My theory about audiophiles is that a lot of them grew up in the 1970s-1990s where there really was a huge difference between "high end" and consumer grade audio. That gap has narrowed considerably. I think there's also a lot more people these days out there actually explaining the engineering and science in good audio (in the old days technical details were considerably harder to look up), this makes it hard to push "marketing oriented" product (eg those infamous audiophile cables). My impression currently is that the audiophile hobby kind of was dying off.

I do think there's a few areas where analog still is a bit better technically (mostly from the musician perspective, things such as distortion and resonant filters), but digital is both often better and just so much more convenient for 90% of things. Those that embrace analog as a religion are rather annoying.

Now, I do remember in the 1980s there was a huge push of digital everything -- digital playback, "digitally remastered", etc. A fair bit of that at the time had major issues -- eg not very nice sounding DA stages, aliasing problems, etc. Perhaps this is where some of this attitude comes from.