It's simply a contest of accuracy. Why it's so much more celebrated , than say darts...is beyond me.
shareGolf has never been my thing. I used to enjoy the driving range though. When I was a teenager, my friend and I lived near a Country Club with lots of woodland surrounding it. One day we found a giant pile of gold balls they irresponsibly disposed of. Between that and the balls we regularly found in he surrounding area, we had quite the collection.
During the off hours in the summer, we would go up on the high teeing ground and have a blast. Ahh the good ole' days.
To me golf just seems boring. But I'm not into sports in general (is golf even a sport?), so make of that what you will.
I think the biggest problem a lot of people have with golf though is that there's a certain elitist connotation to it. It's widely perceived as a game for the rich, at minimum the upper middle class. Then there's the way golf courses are so wasteful, take up so much space, use so much water to maintain them while poor communities around them might not have clean water, etc. This kind of stuff gets embedded in the public perception.
I haven't spent much time analyzing golf or even really acknowledging its existence, so my own opinion of it isn't very strong, but those are some common complaints I've heard from others.