I think you have the symptoms right but I disagree with your premise:

> These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.

While this may come off as a bit pedantic I think it's important to recognize that no one actually thinks "learning things" is offensive or insulting. While it's convenient to package the behaviors of people you don't understand into a single box I think it spawns an unproductive and even unhealthy attitude towards others.

Rather than packing it all into one root issue, I think it's better to try and match the set of symptoms with a set of (possible) causes. Here is my own personal take on the situation:

|== American Culture Has Failed To Adapt To The Internet's Style Of Trust & Reputation

1. Before television a person's world was often restricted to those in their local community, this meant that reputation was everything and as a consequence, people tended to be naturally very trusting, naive even (since betraying someones trust would hurt your local reputation). If your town's doctor or priest told you something, you would believe them.

2. After television become a household staple in the 50s, this perspective changed a bit. Sure you could always /read/ about people outside of town, or even listen to them on the radio, but with TV they were practically right there in front of you. As a consequence this culture of trusting people within the community naturally extended towards those on TV as well. In fact people started to trust people on TV even more than the people within their local community! If the TV said it it must be true! (it often wasn't but then again, how would they know?)

3. Then the internet happened. It was slow, it took a lot of time to saturate into the lives of most people, but I'd say around 2010, the vast majority of people considered it more reliable than TV. It had now taken the throne of truth from TV and as a consequence: three generations of people who were conditioned to believe EVERYTHING they heard on TV without questioning things suddenly got exposed to a platform that was completely unmoderated and without consensus.

4. It used to be that people would just pick favored news channel and believe everything it told them. They thought that being a "skeptic" was doubting the handful of news channels that other people watched, but obviously /their/ news channel got everything right. These beliefs carried over to the internet, especially in the older generations (but not exclusively by any means). To them the only thing that changed is instead of there being 100 or 1000 channels, there are now infinite. But unfortunately they often fail to realize that their culture of trust is incompatible with a platform where that "local" reputation is near meaningless.

|== The Incompetence Of Mainstream Authorities, After Generations Of Public Trust, Has Lost It's Footing

* It's becoming increasingly obvious how incompetent and outright deceitful some of the most trusted news organizations have become without shame. They have of course almost always been this way but atleast local newspapers at a certain degree of accountability. By over optimizing for the web's engagement driven monetization strategies, news orgs drunk on the trust television provided them, have stopped doing their due diligence and pretty much everyone can see this now thanks to (ironically) the web.

* Coastal Elites over-estimating their intelligence and under-estimating the rest keep getting caught trying to play mind games with the public. This applies to many domains but the best example, while repeated ad nauseam at this point, would be health officials saying masks weren't effective against the virus at first so they could avoid a shortage. This created a very large gaping wound in public trust that will take a very long time to heal. While maybe in the days of television this would have been swept under the rug before long, that's not how things work anymore.

* Recent years have simply had too many cases where the mainstream opinion, paraded as absolute, turned out to be naked from the start. Trump was elected (2016), Brexit happened, and the Corona Virus is not just the flu (the was a conspiracy theory back in January 2020). Honestly even a bunch of little things on the side like CNBC saying the hedgefunds closed their position on those GME shorts have also added to this.

|= People Don't Actually Know How To Do Research

* Regardless of generation or exposure to television, people at large straight up do not even know how to do the most basic of research. A shocking amount of people think typing something into google and looking at the first result is something to be proud of. It's not as you suggest where they are proud not to go any deeper, its that the dunning kruger effect has caused many of the populace to believe that there isn't anything deeper to be looked at.

* People fail to understand the value primary sources. Even most programmers which one might assume trend a bit higher on the bell curve, fail to even look at the original documentation or specification for things that they are trying to learn about. When trying to learn about HTTP for example, rather than just looking at Wikipedia to find the RFC numbers and reading the RFCs themselves. They will instead opt to only look at the summary Wikipedia provides, or worse, rely on a bunch of SEO "optimized" tutorial sites that often get things wrong.