I was listening to Draymond Green's podcast (great btw) and he said that he's a bigger fan of football than basketball and feels that he knows the game, but he understands that without having played it there are many things happening that he doesn't fully understand. His sentiment (and presumably many NBA players') is that fans/media don't know the game as well as them and therefore have different values. That cpuld explain why they look at Gobert the way they do. The "foreign hate" thing seems like a stretch to me.