This article is fantastic, and really brings together the thoughts I've heard expressed about this in a way that is mostly accessible. I think it's a bit dramatic though. It seems like people in every era look back and say "Why don't we create things with the same care things were created with in the past?" The existence of the question implies that what is being made now is somehow worse than what has been made in the past.

While it's possible this is true, I think it's more likely that this is just survivor bias at work. Nobody remembers the terrible summer blockbusters from years past. This years robots destroying cities were the Westerns and Noir of years past. Everybody remembers Casablanca, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and these titanic movies overshadow the Noir and the Westerns that they were deconstructing. At some point somebody is going to make The Searchers of robots beating everyone up, and another genre will step in to the role of mass-market crap.

I think the actual argument in the case of the "BRAAM"[1] sound is that Inception is a genre defining movie, on the level of Jaws or Il Brutti. It's become a shorthand for Earth-shattering collisions, in the same way Sergio Leone's soundtracks are synonymous with the west, and the Jaws theme is synonymous with being stalked. You already hear people imitating it to give additional context to stories.

[1] Sidenote, because it bothers me: The sound seems much closer to "BWAAAAA" than "BRAAAAM". This is not important, but it bothers me.