I grew up with “cheesy” meaning tacky, cheap, cliché or crappy - always applied to things: music, movies, consumer products, cultural artifacts.
Gradually I’m seeing it applied more often to people and their emotional affects. A cheesy person is not necessarily cheap or tacky, more overly sentimental or un-ironic in their manner. The usage is most often affectionate, whereas “cheesy” applied to things almost always meant they were junk.
Am I nuts, or is the word slowly changing its meaning?
Apart from the obvious sense involving a connection with or comparison to cheese, cheesy has a couple of distinct meanings.
You’ve got cheesy meaning fine or showy, which I think is now obsolete. It’s connected, I suspect, with the slang term “the big cheese”, meaning an important or self-important person.
You’ve got cheesy meaning inferior, second-rate, below par. This was always applicable to both things and people. PG Wodehouse uses the term fairly frequently with respect to both, from memory; that would be from the 1920s onwards. People in Wodehouse novels feel cheesy from causes as diverse as a hangover, food poisoning, social embarrassment or romantic rejection.
And you’ve got cheesy meaning hackneyed, sentimental,false, tacky - a cheesy song, a cheesy grin. This is American in origin. I’ve never heard it applied to people; a singer of cheesy songs is not a cheesy singer.