"Almost" like a god? But it's the other way around. You should ask people who worship gods: "Why do you praise your gods, almost as if they were enlightened Buddhas?" - That would make more sense, because the Buddha is portrayed in the suttas / sutras as a teacher of the gods, and superior to them.
And this isn't the statement of some late Mahayana Sutras. It's right in the earliest strata of the Pali Canon: "many thousands of deities have gone for refuge for life to the recluse Gotama" (MN 95.9)
I think your question comes more from the idea that the Buddha "was just a wise teacher". This idea has nothing to do with Buddhism, but with Western preconceptions and prejudices, which are rooted in the European Enlightenment.
When Buddha was asked if he was a human, he replied "No."
The Buddha is not a god, not a human. The buddha is a buddha - sui generis.
You say:
The only answer I could come up with is: People can't let go of gods.
What if it's not the Asian, but the Westerner, who can't let go? Let go of preconceived ideas that function exactly the same as idols that prevent the Westerner from understanding Buddha?
You say:
Don't believe in anything except the insights you got from your own
meditation practice.
But what does that mean? It's from the popular Kalama Sutta ... that sutta is the most misunderstood of all! Bhikku Bodhi warns us:
On the basis of a single passage, quoted out of context, the Buddha
has been made out to be a pragmatic empiricist who dismisses all
doctrine and faith, and whose Dhamma is simply a freethinker's kit to
truth which invites each one to accept and reject whatever he likes.
And that is a Western fantasy that has nothing to do with the Buddha-Dharma.
The idea that Buddha is Eternal is not a "cultural" distortion as some have mistakenly suggested. It is in the Mahayana Sutras. It is in the Lotus Sutra, the Nirvana Sutra, the Avatamsaka Sutra, etc.
But if some say this "supernatural" Buddha is a "later" addition or invention by Mahayanists ... in the "early" (Nikaya) Buddhism, it is just the same: if Buddha was just a guy who taught some interesting stuff, how are we to explain that he was able to recollect his past lives, recollect even the beginnings of the universe(s)?
The Tathagata recollects his manifold past lives, that is, one birth,
two births, three births, four births, five births, ten births, twenty
births, thirty births, forty births, fifty births, a hundred births, a
thousand births, a hundred thousand births, many aeons of
world-contraction, many aeons of world-expansion, many aeons of
world-contraction and expansion: 'There I was so named, of such a
clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my
experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away
from there, I reappeared elsewhere; and there too I was so named, of
such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my
experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away
from there, I reappeared here.' Thus with their aspects and
particulars he recollects his manifold past lives.
(from Majjhima Nikaya 12, Samyutta Nikaya 12)