There were many actual "spice wars" fought in the region to wipe out competing crops, to build alliances, and later betray those local allies, etc.
A century or so later, laudenum.
The spice trade itself didn't shrink so much as it was subsumed by other trade, I think, particularly as shipping capacity, reliability, and safety increased.
And even sugar became much less commonly used to in Europe.
If you have data to bring to the discussion I'd be interested in seeing it.
Sugar is included in what were termed spices, FWIW:
In the medieval and early modern periods, ‘spice’ was a term liberally applied to all kinds of exotic natural products from pepper to sugar, herbs to animal secretions.
<https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1777/the-spice-trade--t...>
From the sources I'm finding (relatively few and vague, granted), my interpretation is less that total trade in spices (however construed) fell in absolute tonnage than that the per-tonne value dropped as the goods fell in price and were consumed by far greater shares of the population. It wasn't that spices were less a part of culinary culture, but that because they were so common (both senses of the word) they became less significant. Total tonnage and likely overall value were all but certainly increasing, but the importance attached to formerly exotic goods (pepper, ginger, cinnamon, etc.) fell as anybody could attain these.
Look to the history of the pineapple (of which there were once temples built in its honor in Europe) from exotic to highly mundane fruit for another example:
Only ginger and turmeric are found below soil, and even then you wouldn't usually describe farmers as "literally mining for potatoes."
Others might disagree. English is a fun language.
What cannot be disputed is the significant increase in national wealth brought home by the Dutch operations in what was known as the Dutch East Indies.
Batavia ( now Jakarta) was the capital of the VOC's lucrative spice trade for 3½ centuries.
Ships laden with tamarind, mace, cloves and nutmeg – at that time worth more, gram for gram, than gold - sailed from there to the Netherlands and often wrecked on the Western Australian coast returning with gold.
It's the value per weight part that merits comparison with Spanish aquisition of gold in the new world.
As a native english reader, writer and speaker of some six decades I grasp the tension in the use of ' literally "airquoted" ' and embrace it.
I also enjoy Riddley Walker, the first edition of Clockwork Orange (sans lexicographic annexure), and the outrageously provocative shock value of the opening sentence of Burgess's panoramic saga Earthly Powers.
Your opinion is noted and respected.
I can appreciate that and hope that I added to the tension.
My only mild disappointment is that while I opened the door by airquoting "mining" and drawing attention to an actual nation scale spice industry no one made comment on the "spice mining" in both Dune and in the Spice mines of Kessel being both the harvesting of a seasonally produced organic bloom.
In Dune the spice harvesters surface scooped fresh blooms as they appeared from active worms, on Kessel I believe (I'm no authority here) they harvested old buried organics using mineral mining techniques rather than fresh cropping from a surface source.
EDIT: It appears the Kessel spice may have been a mineral? .. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Spice_mines_of_Kessel
TBH that's a rabbit hole of detail I'm happy to skirt.