It would be interesting to analyze a dataset of commercially sold prepared "coffee" drinks from vendors like Starbucks to see how many are actually coffee, versus coffee-flavored soft drinks, and how this changed over the last few decades.
I think at this point this has basically become an old man yells at cloud take. Folks ordering at Starbucks know exactly what they're getting down to the number of pumps. You've always been able to get any form of unadulterated coffee hot or cold. All the drinks are coffee, you can find the worker manual for Starbucks floating around online and it has all the drink recipes. And it's because coffee is crazy cheap, it would be more effort to fake it. Most of their desert drinks use espresso pulls as the base coffee flavor.
It's hard to work around the fact that coffee, dairy, and sugar taste really good together. Coffee really wants to be a dessert, it's why it's in so many of them. Starbucks just rolled with that and people love it.
