Yes, I like to take pictures of birds, but I did spend a 40 year career designing and manufacturing video and audio equipment for the the film and television industries as well as overseeing much of the standardization of HDTV, so I am quite well aware of the "preferences" of cinematographers. I also choose to disagree with some of the more esoteric beliefs in that industry. I once had a customer for digital audio equipment who claimed he could "hear wire" (a reference to low oxygen speaker wire). A nice concept, but bullsh*t none the less. Similarly, many folks in cinematography community were and still are addicted to 24fps because they can "can tell a story while keeping the viewer apart from the action". Ditto the current fetish with turning off the motion compensation on TV sets (so they go back to 3-2 pulldown and the obnoxious intermittent judder that results in). Once again, this is fetish over physics and much like the more esoteric aspects of wine tasting. A good round of double blind testing always shows how much BS there is in that game, and that is not to say that there isn't a dramatic difference between wines, but rather that the tasting process often goes over the top. BTW the real reason cinematographers hang onto 24fps is because at that frame rate, their skill set is needed to manage pan and zoom rates to keep the judder from making the audience ill. At 60 fps, not so much, so in the end, it is really about job security. In my view, the subtle differences between shooting with a wider lens and letterboxing the result vs. shooting with an anamorphic when the final resolution is the same, fall in the esoteric wine tasting basket. Even in Hollywood, VistaVision pretty much won out over Cinemascope to produce essentially the same look without the anamorphics. This list, while neither entirely accurate or complete, gives you an idea of how many ways people tried to avoid using anamorphic lenses in the film era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motion_picture_film_formats .