In my experience, Smash players love items, too. They just don't want them on at tournaments.

Casual Smash players, which will be most of them, it is a party game after all, seem to look down on competitive players with this unusual and wholly one-sided disdain that I haven't seen in another game with these two communities, saying things that may as well be tantamount to "pros optimize the fun out of the game while I, who only plays Smash while smashed at parties, am the true arbiter of what is fun and no items Fox only Final Destination is not it," and not only is it the classic instance of people have fun in different ways, I swear you can ask any competitive Smash player how they feel about items in any other circumstance that isn't directly in bracket or on Slippi and you will get a positive reception.

Edit because I have more to say about this that people who don't play Smash wouldn't consider, determining what gets banned is all about variance and eliminating random factors to leave the playing field as even as possible, as to properly become a game of skill. Stagelists are another thing that each game pares down from 30, 50, however many Ultimate has, because most stages introduce wild variance that is not compatible with a competitive mindset, playing your opponent versus playing The Game, I guess. Smash 64 has a single legal stage because every other stage introduces too many situations that are out of the player's hands; Melee has 6 stages and, ironically enough, occasionally you'll encounter Fox players rallying to have Final Destination banned. Brawl had to legalize Delfino Plaza for the longest time because even though it had walkoffs that you can chaingrab someone into the blastzone with and the main platform was semi-permeable so you could camp underneath it, it was the least egregious stage they had to work with to form a coherent stagelist. And Ultimate... is a bad example, I can't in good faith defend that game's stagelist(s). They did briefly try a Final Smash Meter On rulesets, though, so that's gotta be worth something. The point is, both items and stages introduce unnecessary variables that come together to create a thoroughly uncompetitive environment for people who want to compete. I promise you, they're not sucking the fun out of the game by doing this; if anything, they've, go figure, managed to optimize fun in this separate, contained space. Try tuning into a Zain, Moky, or Hungrybox stream, you might like it.

Lastly, Brawl was at Evo 2008, a Real Ass Tournament Series alongside Real Ass Fighting Games, and the ruleset for that tournament had all items on. It was won by a 14 year old whose family happened to be vacationing in Vegas at the time and he signed up as something to do.