I like to actually concentrate on the animation rather than splitting my attention between it and text. Since I don’t speak Japanese I get absolutely nothing out of the Japanese audio voices such as the importance of inflictions in dialog. I’d rather hear a language I understand so that I can understand performances. I’ll only chose a sub if the english dub is outstandingly bad, but in most cases I find the dubs perfectly fine.
I think that while some non-Japanese speakers genuinely prefer the Japanese audio, I suspect there is a large group who only claim to prefer it for performative reasons or people who stay quiet because they know if they voice an opinion preferring dubs they’ll get dogpiled by the rest of the fandom.
I think even without speaking Japanese you can understand some of the choices the actors make with their tone of voice. It’s admittedly less that you get out of your native language, but sometimes the English actors make different choices.
For example, I don’t like the dub of Cowboy Bebop because the Jet actor made him sound more like a meat head than I think the character actually is.
Is that a common criticism of Jet? I never thought he was much of a meathead, more like the oft suffering father figure of the crew.
I dunno, I just didn’t really like the English voice. Seemed too disjointed from his true character