There are people who go to off the beaten path type places to be cool, and there are people who do it to get a more genuine experience. Once enough tourists go to a place, it fundamentally changes. You go to Bangkok, for example, and you have to work really damn hard to get a genuine experience. And even if you do that work, Thais see you and think "tourist" and treat you like the average tourist, aka like a douchebag. In places with few tourists, most people have no preconception of who you are. You aren't big white guy who wants young Asian whores, or white drunkard, or disrespectful white guy, or "walking ATM whose money can be mine if I con him well."
My best experiences traveling were in cambodia, taking a motorbike through inland Vietnam, and Laos. My worst experiences were tourist spots in Vietnam, and my most superficial experiences were all of Thailand (minus the beauty of the land), tourist spots in Vietnam, and the one tourist hotspot in each of Laos and Cambodia. The correlation between meaningful/genuine experience and how many tourists typically go to those places is not a coincidence.
Once enough white people go somewhere, whatever the place originally was is gone.