As someone who has spent a lot of time in the NYC classical/art music scene: I have many, many of those personal experiences.
I don't doubt it. However my point is that the scene is so small that direct interactions with the community hardly moves the needle when it comes to the broader cultural perception.
Historically, literate music has always been confined to elite settings. The common people played folk tunes transmitted orally, and later "popular" songs and dances when mass publishing of sheet music became a possibility.
(There's actually no reason nowadays why this published "popular" music shouldn't become a part of the literate canon that's researched academically etc. But that only adds to a very long list of individual composers and entire musical traditions that end up being broadly neglected by standard academic POV's. It's also a general problem wrt. the study of human art and culture.)
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-poor-peoples-ac...
Sacred classical music was accessible to poor people in big cities. Secular classical music was less accessible though.
How many people who perceive classical music as elitist actually have a personal experience of someone on the "inside" acting elitist and shunning them as "outsiders"?