When The Verge launched, it was creative and full of interesting articles.
Something changed, and for the past 12-18 months, it's been pretty close to a "Cosmo for Geeks". They've also started getting some basic technology facts wrong (I first noticed this on their Nexus 4 LTE article, and have continued to notice it off and on through their latest Net Neutrality / Verizon vs Netflix articles)
I've actually noticed the opposite for me: I've enjoyed the articles more over the last 6 months than I have previously.
It might have something to do with how I read it: these days I tend to read Verge on my phone, whereas I used to be more web-only. Their homepage has always overwhelmed me, so maybe the simplified interface has something to do with it.
It's likely that a lot of these sites that made a name following consumer tech are just growing tired of it? What helped grow sites like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc was the rapid growing arena of cellphones, laptops and tablets. All of that has pretty much stagnated, and to be honest is pretty damn boring at this point. So what do you do? You explore and open to other areas beyond straight consumer technology. The problem with The Verge is I think they went too far into pop-culture type stuff.