Have you been around people who actually use trucks for work or leisure? They aren't just hitting the side of their trucks with 2x4's or dropping gravel from ten feet in the air like commercials. Lots of people use their trucks for pulling trailers that carry thousands of pounds of their stuff. They use the bed of their truck for carrying things that are long, heavy, grain, sawdust, smaller animals, there is a wide variety of use cases for a truck and a lot of them don't affect the aesthetic of the truck.

I submit to you that a lot of folks buy things they don't really need or end up using \_(ツ)_/¯

IMO it's a mistake to judge how a product is used in real life based on how it's marketed. There's a pretty big gap, especially for car commercials.

Advertising/marketing/PR persuades people to want buy certain things, not by telling them these things exist at a certain price, but by influencing them psychologically in deeper ways. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

This in turn has actual effects on their behavior, including but not limited to making certain purchases more likely. Obsessing about power and speed and commanding the road definitely has an impact on how people drive - especially younger folks.

Commercials for my tax software tells me it makes people using it feel ecstatic. It doesn't really - it's used by people just trying to get their taxes done and they don't feel anything about it.

These couldn't be more different. Tax software choice is a private choice with no effect on the public space. Tax commercials happen for a couple months.

Car choice influence an incredible array of things up to how cities are built. Car commercial are omnipresent and include product placement in movies as well as, apparently, US presidents gunning it in a new truck, which is the topic of this whole thread.