Super long rant I'm taking off my chest based on limited exposure to the show so take it with a grain of salt incoming.
I think people likes misery, particularly misery at expense of people trying and failing to live up to social expectactions. TBBT mocks at nerds because they're nerds, but to me the geeky shit is just the particular flavour of ridiculing men's failed attempts to live up to a certain normative kind of masculinity, kinda the same way Alan from Two Men and a Half does.
TBBT gets a group of men who are at the very bottom of the hyper-testosteronic masculine hierarchy, but instead of accepting their own kind of manhood and show empathy they double down on the most toxic element of this criteria and attack each other with their obsessive dick wagging, competing for the consolation award of being the top among the rejects. They are constantly mean spirited and especifically mock each other for not living up to the standard that defines a hierarchy that places them at the bottom like masochists.
"But that's the point", fans say, "the show mocks them for being mean-spirited alpha wannabes". Bullshit, the show is completely complicit and expects people to laugh whenever they do anything "not manly", we laugh with the mean spirited remarks. There is a lot of nerd-can't-be-jock humor, stuff like "tee hee they like LoTR but not football" or whatever, but to illustrate my point I bring you laugh prompt over Rajesh, totally alone, watching a movie. Which is part of a longer trend of ridiculing this one character's sexuality for showing interest over fem-coded stuff, including Howard-Rajesh "no homo" jokes which I find surprisingly abundant given the characters rarelyare allowed to express affection.
Like any other sitcom we have an audience's surrogate in the form of a comparatively normal and relatable boner goblin, a disgusting sentient pile of crusty cum sockets on his own but toned down enough to be a functional proxy for us to laugh at the hilarious hijinks of a jewish womanizer wannabe sex offender, the mannerisms of a brown sissy, and the awkward occurrences of a totally-not-asperger-coded weirdo. This dull goblin is the first of the bunch set out to undergo this weird arc of wish fullfillment chadification fantasy by getting a trophy girlfriend, the life goal of every man in the show. Oh, yeah, there are women in this universe by the way, they are basically an afterthought and exist to be trapped in a plot cage with the goblins to eventually be claimed whenever writers feel the show is too stale and needs to be shaked up a little.