Which is to say that I share many, many of the same anchor points you do.
Where we depart, I think, is that (and I say this with ZERO smug superiority) my personal sense of tribalism vis-a-vis the M's is so greatly diminished this past decade that I'm more interested in witnessing GREATNESS than I am in witnessing MARINER GREATNESS.
To my mind, this slow-but-steady shift in my attitude has been largely DUE TO the M's failure to make themselves competitively relevant for a decade plus. But it's spread to every other facet of my vicarious enjoyments. Video games, films, football, MMA, baseball, music...I'm no longer all that concerned with how an entire movie plays out, as I am with whether or not there's that one, key moment, or sequence, or scene that resonates so powerfully with me that it makes me stop and--for just a second--see the godrays streaming down through the briefly parted clouds in the thunderstorm that so frequently surrounds my life.
I feel like that about Ohtani. It's possible he'll flame out (you'd have to lay a heavy bet that way--at least to the degree that he's *merely* a quality #2 pitcher and below-average DH) but it's also possible that we're witness to Baseball's Next Great Icon.
Maybe it's just age that's caused the shift in my attitude. Maybe it's my personality type (taro would probably argue that point pretty hard, since we seem to be clones grown from totally different DNA). Or maybe it really is the experience of being an M's fan for so many years. I don't know what it is, but whatever the case I'm less interested--today--in the Mariners doing good than I am in having my breath taken away.
YMMV, of course, and the beautiful thing about art--which pro sports, oddly enough, are a brand of performance art--is that its value IS largely in the eye of the beholder. We can sit down next to each other and derive precisely the same measure of joy, enlightenment, fulfillment, pleasure, or pain from adjacent seats in the nosebleeds while having wildly different motives/criteria-for-appreciating the spectacle.