They’re relatively cheap and provide a lot of nutritional value for the weight - I buy them in big bags straight from the farmer’s market. Tree nuts (peanuts aren’t actually nuts at all - they’re legumes) are literally a luxury only the rich can afford in my country these days - kind of ironic since we’re the world’s top producer of macademia nuts.
Roasting them is actually important since that degrades aflatoxins - they also just taste better.
As a non-USian viewing all this from the outside, I’d say blaming the people at the bottom for what the largest gaslighting machine in the history of human civilization has managed to achieve is absolutely masochistic.
Your anti-democratic political establishment is to blame for this.