People are designing brand new lenses with well defined abberative character. Orion is a new company who are enjoying mainstream Hollywood adoption. Key scenes in John Wick 2 are taken with Orions. The car park opening action in particular setting up the movie. (Yes, I justified watching John Wick 2 for the optical research. Twice..)
Cooke, the British lens maker infamous for "The Cooke Look" precisely because they hand calculated [0.5] attractive and until very recently [considered] minimal distortion into consistency across their range, are selling right now brand new lenses which retain a considerably consistent amount of that same character whilst hammering undesirable optical traits into negligible measures. Remember that these pictures are being enlarged. (projected) tens of feet across in your nearest theater. Moving vs still pictures do conceal imperfections, but everyone making pictures with these are staring at freeze frames in the DIT and post on equal or better projection for extended periods of time, and distractingly flawed taking optics would simply be eschewed today except possibly for effects cut scenes.
Contrary to the articles self serving and probably just ignorant statement, the lens making Zeiss Consumer unit [2] is in fine health.
However they're making progress in cinema lenses, because this more immediately pays for and nurtues the necessary R&D that's become expensive or impossible to match or follow Sony, Nikon, Canon and Fujinon.
Rather than lament fictional losses of the strongest historical names (I'd be mad as hell if my company was misrepresented in this way) we are gearing up in a renaissance period for optical designs for all applications including enthusiast photography. I have to stop here because the next item on this agenda is manufacturing tolerances and capacity, which caused by increasing resolution has been pushing costs and logistics into divorce territory from the industry of merely ten years ago. That separation is probably underlying so many unfounded and hysterical outbursts posing as nostalgia such as this article.
[0] The BMD is a 12K / 89MP S35/ APS-C sensor for which the highest quality lenses can be obtained for the price of as low as a couple of eg Canon 50/1.0 examples (being just such a lens as draws a very attractive picture with far from modern corrections).
[1] Cooke never seems to have been forthcoming about automated design aides, however the human element and its degree in designs isn't unique even for the hyper corrected Sony and Nikon glass recently launched.
[2] maybe it's revealing that Zeiss denotes $20,000+ lenses as consumer products, but we're informed by their semiconductor division. This price isn't a outlier in any specialist photography field but the performance of this lens currently is a outlier.
[3] new Zeiss Rectilinear 15mm f/1.8 including sample stills: https://www.fdtimes.com/2022/04/05/zeiss-sp15-rectilinear-in...