I sympathize with the bottom part so much. My parents absolutely refused to cook anything ever and bought the worst, most unhealthy prepackaged foods from the grocery stores. I spent the first years of my life thinking that things like apples just weren't sold at my local Kroger because we never had them. I felt like shit mentally and physically for pretty much the first 18 years of my life because of it.
I grew up, moved out, and holy shit I love eating "rabbit food," as my dad used to call it and I never would have learned before is that cooking is fun
The "kids don't like broccoli" has a scientific reason. Kids have a lot more receptors for aromas tasting bitter (10 to 15k different chemical compounds taste bitter to them) which reduce to 5k or less when growing up. So some types of food that adults can eat without problems because they lack the receptors have bitter and vile flavours for kids.
Fun fact: Brocollis is the 'veg kids don't like' in Amercia mostly. Pixar even edited scenes in 'Inside Out' where a dad feeds his daughter broccoli, turing it into bell peppers for the asian market:
Fun Fact, if broccoli kinda tastes like soap to you, congratulations! You have a gene variation that makes certain bitter flavors taste like soap, it's stronger in childhood (which is potentially why "Kids hate broccoli" trope is a thing) and tends to fade into adulthood, but not always.
There are also studies being done to figure out specifically which compounds in broccoli make it taste like that to cultivate it out to encourage more broccoli consumption
Many years ago my kids pediatrician recommended feeding the kids kale smoothies. I didn't have any
Kale at home so I cooked bunch of broccoli to mush and mixed it with bananas. Those kids eat half a pound of broccoli for breakfast just about every day now. They also eat it raw or crunchy cooked. Definitely the best medical advice I've ever gotten and the kids are used to a very simple and quick to make breakfast that keeps them full for hours.
Tldr: Kids constantly surprise me and sometimes they like vegetables.
Broccoli is like green tofu. It tastes like whatever you cook it in. There is perhaps no other food which has more surface area for holding sauce or seasoning.
vegetables in general and tasting bad is moreso lack of preparation/cooking rather than the actual thing itself most of the time. Brusselsprouts is the polarizing one where its seen the most.
My theory on this is that some of the hate for a lot of vegetables comes from either eating canned ones or poorly cooked ones. My girlfriend didn't know she liked green beans until she started living with my family and my father made her some. My dad sautéed the in butter with garlic, and she only had ever had those extremely mushy canned ones and had concluded on that basis she hated green beans.
If you are a super taster, broccoli taste like grass smells. At least for me and my daughter. Its so bitter that I threw up one time when I was a kid being forced to eat it. So lets accept that to someone with a lesser/different sense of taste/smell its okay. To those of us who can smell when someone has been in their house five hours after they left it taste completely different. So no thanks I don't want to eat grass.