If it's lack of authenticity you're after, you probably ought to start with Bob Dylan, tbh. A nice, middle-class Jewish boy from Duluth Minnesota who basically spent his early career pretending to have been a boxcar-riding drifter poet a la Woody Guthrie. A complete fraud.
Petty was good, not just OK. He wasn't great and only occasionally very good, but he was good.
I thought he had quite the impact on those Wilbury chaps who had a few excellent songs. And Learning to Fly is awfully foot tappable.
And he never did anything as bad as Cover Me. So there.