It's just a colossal misread of the demographics. The community was always a mix of people who wanted to build a printer, and people who wanted a printed thing. The community has massively exploded since the early years, and it's almost entirely made of people in the latter camp who, critically, no longer have to go through the former campsite to get there. It doesn't mean there aren't people in the first camp, or even that there are fewer of them. They're just a rounding error now.

You can tell when it happened, because the E3D v6 nozzle pattern went from being a de facto standard across everything to something you need to buy an adapter for, and nobody really seemed to blink.