It’s not so much that blogging died but that commenting on them directly did, and with it blog culture. Commenting now takes place in other venues, not visible to the blog’s reader unless that venue is where they came from.
I wrote my own blog engine in Python (https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata). It generates static pages, but publishes a snippet to Twitter/Mastodon/etc., linking back to the blog post.
I have four new interns who recently started in my team. I'm setting them up for blogging and made the same point to them (almost verbatim).
Another thing that died is the practice of linking to each other like it's going out of style. These days the majority of backlinks are earned through aggressive SEO techniques, not organically like 10-15 years ago. This penalizes regular blogs in favor of crappy blogs run by SEO experts.
I still believe in blogging and I think that the lesser competition, in a roundabout way, makes it easier to stand out. However, discoverability in Google can be a frustrating process both for readers and publishers.
I think most wordpress blogs with commentariats just use Disqus now. It's buggy and unreliable, but the commenting capability is still there generally.
I use commento.io, which allows anonymous commenting. More than half of the comments on my blog are anonymous commenters. I think it's about reducing the initial friction as much as possible.
HN is part of that of course.