People who generally say that have never even bothered to watch a game and don't actually have a clue about what it's like in every other state and territory outside of NSW/QLD.

The NRL is, quite literally, stuck in parts of 2 states with literally 0 chance of expanding, as no one outside of NSW or QLD cares; as the AFL culture there is just far bigger than anything in NRL.

In the meantime, the AFL have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to grow the game in traditional NRL states, whilst working with state gov to implement programs bolstering an introduction to the game, with great success (e.g. Gold Coast now has the highest participation rate for AFL nationally per capita and last I checked, AFL grassroots was something like 4x that of league and union combined in QLD).

Quite frankly, just depends who you hang out with, but I can tell you despite the media hype about NRL (newscorp owns Broncos), there are huge numbers of AFL fans in QLD.