I’m not sure we’re at the point where chess is universally “good”. That might have been the case in Soviet Russia, where chess was hugely pushed by the state, or America in those Cold War years where ordinary society saw it as a noble way beat those Soviets.

Nowadays, however, chess is probably met more with indifference than anything else. One often hears complaints that it is a gimmick that merely shows that a person is capable of memorizing many, many thousands of positions, not that players are intelligent people in some other, more general respect (whatever “intelligent” might mean here).

Furthermore, it is also understood now that unless you invest in a very large library of chess books and dedicate all your waking hours to memorization, you’ll never be able to play chess at a high level regardless of your passion for the game. Yes, people still play e.g. football among their mates even if they know they aren’t ever going to be pros, but chess competition used to have an aura of being open to any clever player who just used his thinker, and that has now been generally shattered. Plus, computers beat people now.