I've been thinking a bit about Appendix N and how I got into reading for fun because of D&D.
What's interesting is thst while I didn't stick around AD&D for long, it absolutely ruined fantasy for me. Lord of the Rings was never as cool as the content of a D&D session and I remember when the New Weird became a thing and fantasy authors started blending SF and Fantasy I just thought of all those 1970s D&D modules with UFOs in them.
A lot of grimdark was dudes writing about their old campaigns.
Conversely, I look at a lot of OSR stuff and I a) don't think the worlds are more interesting than books, and b) I don't think they're as interesting as those old D&D modules were at the time.
A lot of OSR modules have settings that feel self-consciously derivative while also being so optimised for play that they don't feel real and so are not evocative for me, but then I know that I do tend to run worlds rather than games and OSR stuff is very gamey.
I found Troika had enough of a world to latch onto when my group played it. It's one of those things where there is a lot of drive by lore in the class descriptions etc. The negative for me is that Troika modules (like all NSR) tend to be linear / railroady with the tables as a gloss over that. But the game itself is good I think, and if you don't like the system it's still a fine gonzo setting for B/X.