drivers that enjoy manuals have always been around. We’re just louder now because they almost don't make cars with manuals anymore, so when one does come along we rejoice.
Genuine question: What exactly do you enjoy? Twenty years go, you could do a mountain road engine braking with downshifts, getting then the perfect gear for the turn apex and coming out perfectly balanced. But cars have changed. Engine braking is a lot less effective today (different compression ratios, better mechanics). Automatics now have more gears and allow you to manually select the gear, so you can control available torque in the turn.
It seems the advantages of manual transmissions no longer exist.
I dislike indeterminate lag between input and action.
With an automatic, there's a threshold where the car decides to downshift when asking for a particular increase in forward velocity; that set point will wander depending on current RPM state and velocity and drive gear ratio.
Modern cars are bad enough with turbos and fancy valve timing and throttle by wire stuff where the behavior of the thing is a big stack of jitter, but adding a transmission to the mix makes the response times even more random.
At least with a manual transmission, the behavior of the throttle pedal is far more predictable and direct -- down the engine will go faster (modulo the current drive gear) and up the engine will slow down and slow the car down. Often you're in the incorrect gear for a particular desired acceleration but there's a feedback loop that you participate in to recognize / avoid the issue (mash pedal, not much happens because you're in the wrong gear, you get feedback and decide to change gears). With an automatic, you're just yelling down to the engine room asking the hamster to get on a different wheel.
Predictable, usually. Lag free? Not in my experience. Most of the time there’s a good quarter to half second between requesting the shift and the transmission acting.
For me at least, that lag is very effective at disconnecting me from the experience of driving.
Oh, I don't dispute that maybe very modern cars have addressed this. I don't swap cars too often and have been pretty happy with my "one transmission, a planetary reduction gearbox" car (maybe there are 2 transmissions, one on the front motor and another on the rear motor? Regardless, there's a static gear ratio that's always engaged).
The lag is only part of the issue -- it's the determinism of the lag -- the 125ms lag between "more power please" and getting more power is actually more lag than the instant ka-chugachug of asking for more power and getting feedback of "you're in the wrong gear, bubba" if you're in a manual transmission car.
As far as "I won't change gears for you unless you ask" transmissions -- I've never driven such a car, I'm sure they're quite nice. I somewhat dislike the gear changers with no affordance to indicate what gear you're in (this applies to wingding manumatic cars, motorcycles, and modern bicycles with thumb / finger triggers) -- I don't use them often enough to have the muscle memory of "up for lower gear ratio" or whatever, I have to think about it and look at an indicator and fiddle with it to get the right ratio for what I want.
I'm sure with practice it would eventually be fine; but in actuality I've found that the electric car is actually exactly what I want.
