I've always listened to metal as one of many genres. As a Gen Xer my first access to music was a Sony Walkman, which my parents gave me along with "Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. It was great, but I wanted to be cooler, harder, so I chose as my second cassette "Kill 'Em All", the debut album of METALLICA, which turned out to be an excellent choice.
But I'm noticing that over time, while I continue to listen to many genres and add new ones (currently country), my most favorite artists list is becoming dominated by metal. It started with symphonic metal cello band Apocalyptica, then the operatic metal genre creating/defining Nightwish, which flowed into my folk metal phase of Eluveitie, Korpiklaani, SKILTRON etc. Then my friend introduced me to the absolutely incredible banger-machine that is Sabaton.
And at this point, while I've loved many artists, and my playlists are highly diverse, I can't think of any that rank anywhere close to Nightwish & Sabaton for me. They just completely dominate. So while I didn't come at them through metal, I came at metal through them, I guess that makes me a metal guy now.
Finally an analogy that few of you will get: Nightwish is to Operatic Metal as Georgette Heyer is to Regency Romance, which I mean in the most depressing way. Incredible genre-creating creator, with amazingly consistent content, and you'd think with such a clear, simple template & founding tropes it would be easy for many more creators to work within the genre, yet...
...they basically all suck, which I'm going to rigorously define as "the total number of creations that reach the 50th percentile of the original creator's works, by every imitator put together, is fewer than those by the original creator".
Unlike many situations where the genius is the genre created, and so later contributors are often much better than the creator, in these cases it turns out sadly to be only an impoverished pseudo-genre because the magic was in the creator.