It could have been so much worse, and did become so. Late 90s / early 00s had Cartman being a role model to kids.

Cartman was not a role model for kids, he was portrayed as a lazy, fat, and stupid asshole in an edgy comedy show not intended for children.

Cartman typically had the most and funniest jokes and almost always got his way. He exercised power over others and only extremely rarely did the way he acted have negative consequences for him. That's a pretty attractive role model for the type of kid who's going to watch South Park. Role models don't have to be consciously selected, that's kind of the point, you see success and you imitate it. South Park is an especially stupid show but you'll see this in plenty of TV - it's basically the sitcom model: some character will be an asshole to everyone around them, but the show will frame it as a joke and consequence-free. The writers want you to think that character is funny and you probably do if you continue watching, so if you want to be a funny person you probably start acting like an asshole. Most adults can't see that for what it is - kids are screwed.

And South Park was (is?) on TV during daytime hours, of course kids watched it.

He was, factually, a role model for kids. I was there. Everybody watched South Park, everybody thought Cartman was awesome.

It's absurd to even deny it, Cartman was admired and emulated by a whole generation.

The bottom line is, Cartman got the biggest laughs. He modeled that a certain type of behavior resulted in certain outcomes. Kids aren’t stupid. They see right through the overt morality (“he’s a jerk and he got his comeuppance “) to the revealed truths: being an asshole, in some contexts, can be very funny.

Whether or not he was intended as one is irrelevant.

Vs. the fine, upstanding young Beavis and Butt-Head were from the early 90's...

Hey, Butt-Head became a senator in his later years: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

I am earnestly inclined to double down on smart alecs and sarcastic wits as a matter of pragmatism.

Ok, but will you do so persistently?

I was going to comment something similar. I think I'm about the same age as the commenter grew up reading C&H, and also had a disaffected attitude. I don't think it was Calvin that made me that way, but the broader media at the time. Heck, most kids at my school did not read it but the general way to be cool was to be aloof.

I think it was a hangover from Gen-X and the 80's. Ferris Bueller was pretty aloof and angst'd to the gills wasn't he?

With regard to Cartman, that critique is valid. With regard to Calvin, he is there to be the foil to Hobbes, who dispenses the wisdom. Calvin and Hobbes is a transmission of wisdom. Moreso in the later years, admittedly, but even early on. There is such a thing as the fool archetype. Frodo in LOTR, Emmet in the LEGO movie, and so on. These characters who know nothing, and are demonstrably unfit for the tasks that life demands of them, are not meant to be admired for their ignorance, rather it is their ignorance that allows the writer to send them on a journey to learn a lesson that is valuable to the audience. This is a bit harder to pinpoint in Calvin and Hobbes due to the episodic nature of a weekly strip, where the plot resets each time and the punchline almost invariably involves Calvin reverting to some stubborn point of view or refusing to learn a lesson. Yet if you read the works from beginning to end in the anthology, you can see a progression in both Calvin's attitude and the subject matter on Watterson's mind. The theme is maturation. To critique Calvin for being all that you said is to miss the point. Which, if you were a child reading them at the time (as I was!) nobody can blame you for. It might have been recieved better if your parents had been party to the reading of the strips, so they could bring forward the subtext. But anyway, it is not accurate to say that Calvin and Hobbes glorifies the anti-hero, sarcastic, childishness. Calvin is constantly lampooned and presented as being the cause of his own suffering for refusing to learn.