In the 1950's drifting was known as a driving technique but it was only used in motorsports, fast forwarded to the 1980's drifting was used as a unique racing discipline that started in Japan by Kunimitsu Takahashi, he is also known as "father of drifting". Now days people have a very aggressive style of drifting internationally. Moving to some popular question such as "How did drifting get so popular", Drifting got popular because of anime's and movies, such as. Initial D, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift and many more, but theres also a person that is Kunimitsu Takashi or "Kuni-san" as his surname that first won over the crowd with his very agressive drifting style.
Some way to learn how to drift is to join some drift schools, the most reccomended drift schools according to my knowledge is J99XAR and aydriftcollege. The thing that makes this school good is because some of the people that went to this school goes internationally famous.
Another way to learn how to drift is to buy a simulator. Simulators can help some people to learn how to drift since there is some game that is really realistic, such as asseto corsa, beamng, and many more! These games are very entertaining and very effective for people to learn drifting without paying for tires.