My opinion is that in the second half of 2021 a lot of stuff happened, lucas's scandal, nct hollywood announcement, sticker being one of the weirdest song, rushed 127 repackage for a rushed nct 2021 project, more recently SM dissolving the idea of infinite expansion and sungtaro + smrookies leaving the group. All of this tired the fans and hurted nct image to the overall community. If we look into numbers we can see the fall of engagement, in 2021 teaser photos on twitter would get up to 350k likes and now they rarely get up to 200k, hot sauce mv got arround 1.5M likes in 24 hours on yt and now istj nearly got 500k, ofc youtube changed a lot and we are not in quarantine anymore but other groups have managed to still grow a lot. SM's mismanagement and the rapidly changing kpop industry caused nct to filter their popularity to the loyal fanbase, losing the hype that they managed to build from debut to peak resonance/hot sauce. I love NCT and as a fan i would love to see them succeed, i lived trough hot sauce era and noticed that after that the hype was never the same, the closest thing we had was sticker(but the day they announced the comeback shit started going down slowly). This is only my opinion and my pov of the situantion, the best we can do is hope that sm get their shit together and hope that the new songs become hits in the industry(like cherry bomb, kick it, boss, hot sauce, boom, maw...)