I don't like roasted green vegetables and I suspect a lot of people like the sound of roasted green vegetables more than the actual taste or they are not used to the other good ways that green vegetables can be prepared.
In California cuisine it seems to be very common to roast green vegetables. Roasted vegetables sounds great but I don't think I've never had any that I would prefer to the way I'm used to green vegetables being prepared.
I've I had roasted green vegetables prepared by many otherwise good cooks, literally two different Cordon Bleu certified chefs in home meals. A bunch of different restaurants that are middle quality restaurants.
I find the flavor not toasty or caramelized or savory, but slightly burnt tasting. Foods that lack starches, proteins and or fat, do not caramelize, toast, or brown or smoke in a savory or sweet way. Instead they just smell like burnt grass or burnt leaves, presumably having a lot of slightly strange reactions between the fiber and the chlorophyll and vitamins in the leaves. Nutritionally I suspect that they are inferior for that reason, both destroying vitamins, oxidizing a lot of phytonutrients, and probably even producing some carcinogens. Correspondingly, I find this leads to an acrid burnt smell and a tough but not crisp texture. It's kind of wilted and stringy at the same time.
The vegetables that I'm talking about in particular are pretty much any green vegetable but most notably, roasted brussel sprouts, green beans, broccoli, cabbage, artichokes, etc... I see this practice more common among vegetarians. I wonder to an extent if it's an echo of pleasant memories they're trying to recapture from roasted meats. Roasting potatoes, or corn, or sweet potatoes, carrots, etc... things with high starch does work though I'm not a big fan of this either.
In my opinion the proper ways to prepare green vegetables are:
Fresh
Steamed
Sauteed
In stews
In soups
In smoothies
Creamed
Even boiled
Anyway that doesn't scorch them. It's simply that green vegetables that gets scorched are not undergoing the regular Browning reactions. They're just lightly burning rather than triggering caramelization or a mallard reaction, or converting fats to smoke flavor.
I don't deny the possibility that some people might just prefer this as a matter of taste. But it tastes so off and ruinous to me that I have a hard time believing that it's the culinary victory that most people seem to affect it is. It seems like it's just some weird form of memetic contagion causing people to deny the evidence of their senses.
Or I could just be weird.