I love conferences, but I also loved other types of clearly pop-cultural conferences, and that's what they are.
I used to make a living producing livestreams for these kinds of conferences and they're all about passionate geeks coming together to build connections over the current latest trends.
They are about bonding over either rejecting the values of "the establishment" in your area of interest, or of simply examining how "new pop idea X" fits into the set of values your community is currently built around.
So they are about community building around a set of values, often trying to set themselves apart from the mainstream. Nothing wrong with that.