Working in f2p games, I've thought about this quite a bit. From my observation, you have causality reversed. There's a new audience that is demanding progress-based games and that new market is pushing a lot of game designs away from skill-based challenges.
Going back to the pac-man era, games had to be extremely challenging because they couldn't have enough content to stay interesting otherwise. That selected for gamers who enjoyed overcoming great challenges and pretty much defined "what games are" for 30+ years. Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery.
That huge, newly discovered audience pushes back /hard/ when the games they play swing towards rewarding mastery. They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress. For them, it's not about winning the gold at the Olympics. It's about tending a garden/getting fit/going on a hike. Imagine going on a hike and some weird old man stops you to say "No. That guy hiked better than you. You must go back down the mountain and start over from the beginning until you hike better than someone else." You'd never come back.
Meanwhile, the classic, challenge-oriented audience is still there and games are still being made for them. But, a lot of them are discovering that sometimes they just want a nice hike as well. Thus more and more products are responding to that new demand.
Gaming is a bigger world now. After 30+ years, the focus has shifted from being laser-locked on catering to hardcore gamers like you and me. Now there are not just different genres of fun challenges, there are different genres of fun.