Yes, it's not a big hit with Catholics over here, and I once courted a Derry girl who was over here in her first year at University in the city where I once lived. Fireworks were not a thing in Northern Ireland (I suspect they are still not, now). The explosions and repeated bangs simply reminded her of bombs and gunfire, a daily occurrence in those days. We'd just gone out for a night down the pub when it all started kicking off. After 20 minutes or so she was tearful, shaking and begging to be taken home. I think an awful lot of people who lived through The Troubles in NI probably still have undiagnosed PTSD.
As for the infamous Gunpowder Plot, the theory that it was a setup to entrap Catholic extremists is very persuasive. The preceding Tudor dynasty had seen to it that England was an extremely efficiently-run police state, and Sir Robert Cecil as Lord Chancellor and Sir Francis Walsingham, the head of the secret intelligence service, were thorough and ruthless men. Walsingham was a violently anti-Catholic Calvinist and both were serving a new monarch who also lacked the comparative tolerance of his predecessor Queen Elizabeth.
The US was founded on the principle of religious tolerance separation of Church and State. One of the founding states was Catholic Maryland, and my home state (PA) emphasized religious tolerance. But the US also has a history of anti-Catholic prejudice/abuse, with some church-burnings like in the movie Gangs of New York. It got a lot more tolerant by the time JFK got elected, and Biden is another Catholic president. I'm not Catholic, but I didn't like anti-Catholic sentiment enough that I changed from Evangelical school to Catholic school in the 1990's when Catholic schools had become soft and nice. I was a Protestant kid with only a few other Protestants in a Roman Catholic school, and the staff were nice to me. So this is partly why I find torchlight processions of English burning effigies of the Pope disturbing.
I think about 20-25% of the US is Catholic, whereas England was very effective in repressing Catholicism- England went from a Catholic country under Henry VIII to a country where today about 2% or 2 million of English are Catholic. It's about the size of the US Jewish population.
The story goes that Fawkes and some Catholic conspirators tried to blow up Parliament, and they got sentenced to what the US would consider cruel and unusual punishment. But the Pope was not blamed for the attempted act, and burning effigies of the Pope feels like general violent anti-Catholic sentiment. OK, they aren't burning actual Catholics, but this kind of hysteria led to a bunch of purges, like the "Popish Plot" and the executions over the Fire of London. If you're not Catholic, then you don't feel it as much, and if you're intolerant, it seems maybe the kind of thing you would like or get into.
It's not really true that the US is totally a "tolerant" nation in its history, with lynchings of blacks in the South after the Civil War being a case in point. Guy Fawkes Night reminds me of that kind of sentiment.
I was reading a lot of information online about the Gunpowder Plot from a critical point of view, and it was interesting, entertaining, at times reading like court intrigues. There's a lot of solid evidence that goes against the idea that it was just a plot cooked up by Catholics against the government, alot of coincidences that serve as circumstantial evidence of an anti-Catholic government faction arrangement behind the "Plot."
The amount of gunpowder moved below the Parliament was such a big warload that transporting it and putting and keeping it down there seems likely that it should have already attracted notice, instead of it just being a random last minute discovery by a watchman. The accused plotters used a building next to parliament in order to take the powder into the building and transport it under the ground and under parliament. However, the building that they used was owned by the government or by a Protestant family connected to the government. There are alot of other pieces of evidence like this that a faction of the government knew that the "attempt" was going to happen.
As far as "Cui Bono," at that point in history, the Catholics in England were a repressed minority. They were happy that King James had become king because they were hoping that he would be more tolerant toward the Catholic population. Blowing up parliament wouldn't give them much benefit in practical terms, whereas in symbolic political terms it would bring on much more represssion.
