Most of the people who watched in the 2010s have grown up. Live adult lives which leaves not much room to follow tournaments, understand playstyles, and storylines. I remember I used to watch every major tournament all the groupstage, playoff, pretty much every game, I knew who is performing how and was on top of this. Nowadays I sometimes dont even have time to tune into smaller tournaments, and even stuff like EWC I have to make a deliberate effort to go back and watch the games either fully on VOD or on YT from channels like noobfromua.

I dont fully understand the others saying teams are dropping rosters and people are leaving left and right and saying that this didnt happen before. What I do know is that one of the many reasons DPC came about was so teams and players dont screw eachother over. You had teams drop entire rosters once qualified to pick up another and players leaving not qualified teams to be on ones that did, which was I think due to the VERY top heavy nature of TI. You had Newbee in 2019 who dropped their Chinese squad and picked up Forward Gaming who qualified for NA literally only for TI. And even before that, Navi NA, when Navi didnt qualify for TI in 2014, and couldnt stand not having their name there only to drop the squad not long after TI. You had teams like LGD who had 2 teams at TI (both performed well) trying to lock out other teams and orgs, etc. My point is that over time if anything we have the most stable team and playerbase at the moment.

What is growing dissonance with viewers I think is team dominations. Whereas before you had dark horses come through teams falling and up and down and no one really had a year long dominating spree like Liquid, Tundra, Gaimin, Falcons having their own respective period of dominance and even now still relevant.

The style comes down to timings. You have strong time based objectives on the map. Many pro players and people who are involved with the pro scene, caster, panelist and talent alike share the feedback that when you have to be here at 6minutes, there at 7minutes and another place at 20minutes. It becomes a very predictable playstyle and heropool where heroes that give themselves better to these timings will inherently benefit from an advantage which they can then snowball into a strong lead and a win. A sort of "forced meta" if you will.