We recommend the best/most popular of a genre to newcomers, but the best are often those that break the genre conventions which would be totally lost on a newcomer.
Or they end up seeing the best part of it, and it's all downhill from there.
That's what happened with me and anime. First thing I ever saw was Akira, sometime around 1992. Very, very few anime movies have even come close to measuring up to that first experience. So I actually don't have a lot of interest in seeing much new stuff in that genre anymore.
Not arguing about Akira being peak, but "anime" isn't a genre, it's a medium.
Gotcha! I always just considered it a genre of movies I watch, but of course there are as many genres of anime as regular movies have.