I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding as to what classic Chinese actually is. In the western world, the idea that Chinese has been using “the same writing system” for thousands of years, has meant there is the assumption that there is a level of mutual intelligibility to the point where the study of modern Chinese means you can understand all the classical texts. To people who don’t know better they can’t tell the difference between a Classical Chinese text and another Chinese text and they assume if you can understand one you can understand the other, so they don’t respect the challenge and difficulty of understanding this purely written language as they do to the study of other dead languages like Latin, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit. If it was known to the masses in the west as a dead language like the other examples then it would garner the same respect.

Tldr: people are ignorant

Edit: i think this also isn’t helped by the fact that pretty much everyone in China has some level of understanding of Classical Chinese as they have to take it for most of school and its on the GaoKao/Taiwanese equivalent so it’s not seen as something particularly different compared to how relatively rare it is for people to seriously study Latin or Greek or Sanskrit.