What I like about chanteys as a form of folk music is that trying to sing them right imposes a form of discipline. They should be sung in such a way that the rythm could be used in work, with a regular beat for hauling. With a little imagination on the part of the "chanteyman," they can sound genuine, like something real people used as a work-song.

So what I don't understand is why they are so rarely sung that way. Go to a chantey-sing, and what you mostly hear is chanties sung as if they were camp-songs, or occasionally as if they were ballads.
And 60% of what you will hear is not chanties at all, but singer-songwriter stuff about sailors, often unbearably sentimentalized. E.g. "Mary Ellen Carter" and "Rolling Down to Old Maui," which are enormously popular, but which I refuse to believe actual sailors created, or sang, or ever would have sung. Try to picture a grizzled old hand from off a whaler singing,

"It's a rough, tough life of toil and strife,
We whalemen undergo."

Imagine any ordinary practical person from a working class background, in a song intended for his/her own use and not to impress literary folks, using expressions like "rough, tough," "toil and strife," or "undergo." The song then goes on to put on "authenticity" by adding 20th expressions like "give a damn." I further refuse to believe that before 1900, in any case, people used "give a damn" in the casual way it is thrown into that song.

And yes, I know Stan Hugil liked the song. I also think Hugil was not above pulling a fast one on credulous city audiences.