No artist can make rent money in that atmosphere.
Artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass were gigantic innovators, they were iconoclasts, they wanted WCM to go way beyond what it was stuck at in 1970s. Of course they spent decades being considered a charlatan by their colleagues. Philip Glass in an interview explains how, when he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble and started producing his early (brutally minimalist) music people tried "helping" him by teaching basic musical composition, and told him that he needs to learn basics first before writing music like that. It's a farce really, from 2020s having listened to 21st century post-minimalism, if you go back and listen to early minimalism in 1970s and 1980s (think, Music for 18 musicians, Music in 12 parts, Einstein on the beach, in C, Glass Violin Concerto, De Stijl etc) it's just haunting how creative their music is. They had to invent everything from scratch! You have to go all the way back to 1640s Froberger to find anything that remotely sounds idiomatic within the tradition, while aggressively responding to their contemporaries like the extreme-complexity of Boulez etc. It's really unfortunate, my sense is, modern music education creates very conservative, robotic craftsmen who play technically perfectly but are unable to see innovation and artistic response.
I would like to say 21st century WCM is in a much better situation and there is more creativity, but I would say it's likely a marginal improvement over late 20th century, rather than a significant transformation.