/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Can somebody explain Japanese idols to me

I am not a man of culture to the degree of some of the gentlemen on this board, the most I've gotten into "otaku culture" was watching more or less mainstream anime (my favs right now are Ranking of Kings and Sonny Boy) and then researching the producers and stuff because I was interested in how they got made.

One day I went down a bit a wiki/news rabbithole of some major idol groups like Nokizaka46 and AKB48, and all I could think at any given moment was -

"What on the actual fucking earth am I looking at right now?"

- Everything about it is off-putting, and the more clinical explanations of wiki articles don't help with that.

Besides being music groups, it seems from a distance like an advanced exploit of how fan-bases grow and act for profit, but it seems more complex than that.