Sure, its just something else when you try to push a point or stir a controversy by constantly repeating "why they don't make things like that anymore" without actually looking into why they stopped and why they don't anymore.
The worst is when people say "Why don't they make things like X anymore", where X is one of the best examples of its type from the entire decade it was created. They didn't make things like X back then either, you dingbat!
X is a stand-out work of genius, head and shoulders above everything else it was contemporary with, at the time it was made. It was the confluence of strong artistic vision, technical excellence and innovation, and near-flawless execution, where all the parts managed to come together cohesively without any thematic friction - which rarely happens in any project. The reason X is better than 99% of stuff made today is because it was better than 99% of stuff made then, too.
Someone probably will make something as good as X this decade, but expecting most things to be as good as X is absurd. Remember Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap.
People also tend to forget (or not know due to never having experienced that specific period themselves because young age or any other reason) that during the time when “things like X” were actually made, there was a point of oversaturation (without much evolution happening), and the public got tired of it and moved on to something more unexplored.
Examples: pop-punk in early to late 00s, photorealism in paintings in 1900s, “boomer shooter” videogames of late 90s/early 00s, etc. I don’t see photorealism in paintings having a massive comeback or a nostalgia wave right now, but pop-punk and “boomer shooter” videogames have been having pretty strong nostalgia waves recently, and they are doing quite ok.
And I 100% agree with your overall point, people remember titans like the original DOOM/Quake, but forget the flow of all the lazy unimaginative derivative slop that eventually started proportionally dominating those niches (which is what eventually spelled out the end of the mainstream hype era for those, and let us enter the “they dont make things like that anymore” fallacy stage).
Although I know what you're saying, I couldn't help thinking that X actually isn't genius, especially contrasted to how it was before the rocketman took over.
Please get help. Bringing up this entirely off-topic flamebait here is analogous to bringing up Donald Trump in a thread about copyright issues surrounding Donald Duck. Aka “something better reserved for reddit”.
"because doing $contemporaryStyle is cheaper and more broadly appealing, and might even have some practical benefits. And it's cheaper not just because it's inherently more optimized or because labor is more expensive than it was back then, but because being the only one doing $oldWay means you don't have any scaling benefits and will struggle to find labor. Going with the herd is just inherently better value for money". There, free premise for a 1h youtube video. Just adapt it to architecture or cutlery or something.
We do get those, search for photorealistic paintings. It's just that they are not very popular and people don't value them much. They tend to be interesting only in the context of being a painting that looks like a photo.
AFAIK with the proliferation of photography the people who used to do life-like painting of other people lost a lot of business and it seized being a profession.
