No, I’m saying that in a sense, no calories are “useless.” All calories provide energy.
To you, maybe.
soda: I can take it or leave it. I have no strong preferences to any flavor or sweetener (except Splenda, and in that case I’ll only take a few sips). I know people get all worked up about it because, well, it’s there. On the shelves, in the restaurants, in the vending machines. It’s there and it isn’t ever going to go away. So it isn’t very healthy? people are used to it and are going to keep drinking it. Bacon, cold cuts, hot dogs, Twinkies, canned soup - none of that is particularly healthy, yet people are going to keep eating it. As long as it’s in the stores, people are going to drink soda and eat processed foods even if water and organic lettuce and whole grains are flogged as the wise choice.
I used to love Fresca. I drank it often. I had no idea it was a diet drink because it didn’t say Diet Fresca on the label. For some reason, it didn’t trigger my saccharin alarm - maybe because I didn’t have a sugared version in my taste bud history to compare it to.
Then, at some point in the 80’s they changed the sweetening ingredient from saccharin to aspartame. After tasting that new improved recipe, I wrinkled my nose at it and could only finish half the bottle. I don’t think I’ve had one since then.
I wonder what a sugar-sweetened version would taste like.
Well yes, but anyone complaining about empty calories is probably a lot more concerned about getting too many calories, or not getting enough nutrition from their set amount of calories than passing out from lack of calories.
No doubt. But the premise of the OP was “useless calories” and “obsolete” beverages. Bogus, in other words.
A typewriter 
We stock a single model of typewriter at work, and sell about three a year, usually to elderly people who are replacing their old typewriter after it was destroyed in a house fire/dropped from a plane/nuked from orbit (those things are hard to kill).