Since this article goes through the timeline I thought I'd give my thoughts on how I see it. I feel like it's hard to emphasize, or even remember how subversive the tracks felt in the early days. Listening to easy-listening tracks poorly chopped was just not cool, it was weird, even other online people thought you were weird and that the music you were listening to was bad, and that was a lot of fun.

I think the bad chopping is one of the most sorely missing things from the newer songs. When the tracks were more actively alienating or punishing to listen to, it made them more interesting, and helped justify the liberal sampling. There was an effort to make the easy listening become harder to listen to.

I wouldn't say it lost its "political" roots because I'd like to think it was more than mere political music, but it definitely did lose something where tracks often felt like ideas, like each was saying "what about this? Isn't this weird and interesting? Does this make you feel something about the modern world, consumer culture, the job you have or the one you will be applying for, etc.?" That has seemed to turn into mostly pure nostalgia, rather than anything challenging or interesting.

I think those characteristics are why people sensed its impending doom early. A genre about ideas can't survive the race-to-the-bottom effect of popularity, especially if a core component is engaging with feelings of alienation by actually being alienating. That's why future funk quickly sprouted alongside, and eventually cannibalized vaporwave, because we wanted the non-alienating version. But all that was was straightforward sampling of great pop music we hadn't heard of with no attribution, which eventually lead people to listen to the original Plastic Love 10 years later because it turns out to be better than the remix.

Despite everything I wrote, a recent album by desert sands feel warm at night did really blow me away.