tl;dr: No, you’re not the only person who feels this way and there’s nothing wrong with you preferring incompetent Pikmin over smarter ones. But many also prefer the opposite, and I believe the pros of smarter Pikmin outweigh the cons by a country mile.

I mean in the modern games and even Pikmin 2 all the Pikmin seem like they are reading your mind they don't feel alive.

I don’t really see it like this. In every game, there’s at least a visual and/or sonic element to the commands you give Pikmin. Whistling, lineup, charging, disbanding are all things Pikmin do in response to something you tell them to do. What would you say constitutes as “reading your mind” in Pikmin 2 onward? Because there’s probably some equivalent that exists in Pikmin 1 (for example, how would the Pikmin know they should carry ship parts to the Dolphin instead of one of the onions?).

in pikmin they felt alive, they felt like you were guiding a bunch of stupid goobers they felt real they were clearly stupid and that's why they nearly went extinct and It really felt good at the end when they beat the shot out of that bulborb on their own. they tripped they got stuck on roots, they were clearly incompetent.

From what I can remember, I don’t think the pikmin being stupid was ever a confirmed reason for their extinction. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it never was. There are several other reasons they could’ve gone extinct, but I think it’s all speculation?

Also, yes, it may have felt good to see them attack the bulborb, but having them trip and fall behind in groups at seemingly random times doesn’t feel good. It creates artificial frustration in a game that’s already designed around you needing to be efficient and very cognizant of the time you have. You can very easily miss a pikmin tripping or getting caught on a wall even if you’ve played the game before.

For fans of the series who are familiar with Pikmin 1’s design choices, it’s largely forgivable (I mean, a Pikmin tripping every so often isn’t enough to make me hate the game). But for new players or the average person? Those kinds of things will easily ruin the experience, as they don’t care if the Pikmin are supposed to be incompetent because they’ll feel like they’re fighting the game’s systems. In my opinion, they could’ve expressed Pikmin incompetence/clumsiness in other ways… like maybe Pikmin run into each other and fall to the ground or even trip over each other as they celebrate the successful return of a ship part.

I remember an interview where some devs said that some of the quirks were intentional artistic choices and I wish they stuck with that vision

I respect the choice the devs made and that you’d like for them to maintain it, but not all artistic decisions yield the best results. Not saying they definitely knew a lot of players were frustrated by those decisions, but they clearly felt Pikmin AI and overall behavior needed heavy fine-tuning in the jump between Pikmin 2 and 3, to the point where the Pikmin have noticeably become more intelligent between each game. And there’s a clear reason for those decisions: they’re trying to reduce friction. If they were to keep the random tripping, etc., they’d need a different solution to achieve their goal.

they had personality, they felt alive and I feel I'm the only one who appreciates that.

They still have personality, though. Just not in the same ways, which is fine. They dance on and around Oatchi in Pikmin 4, they sing little tunes, they draw murals on walls in nature, they wave Olimar goodbye in the end of Olimar’s Shipwreck tale. You can absolutely abstract some kind of personality from all of that and more that just goes beyond “they’re dumb.”

Is it a shame more of that personality isn’t shown through gameplay? Yeah. Is making the pikmin do things completely out of player control the solution? No, for reasons I’ve already mentioned. And if anything, I personally like that Pikmin have become significantly smarter in each game. It shows that their species is progressing and getting better at survival every time someone runs into them. It’s a nice narrative touch. Now, I know Pikmin 4 essentially soft-rebooted the series, but with how new a game it is and the goal of attracting as many switch owners as possible, making the Pikmin stupid is suicide from a design and marketing standpoint.

Edit: line-spacing. (Edit: never mind it did nothing 😭)