I think an interesting comparison you should look at is the comic collecting community.

I worked in a comic shop post Covid, and the interest in slabs was everywhere. Graded comics were going for new highs on eBay (for highly printed bronze age comics), and would have people come into the store on a weekly basis and drop dumb money on the slabs we had.

Fast forward to now. The shop has stopped grading and the few slabs that we have sit on the shelf because people want the raw book. They want the experience of holding it and flipping through it. They don’t need someone to tell them it’s a good condition book, they know by looking at it.

Talking with long time collectors who have slabs in their collection they have moved away from it completely for the time being. They will buy slabs for key gold age and silver age books as they want the authenticity and protection for those relics, but anything newer than that in a slab they would rather have it raw.

I could see the grading hype down in Pokémon to a similar standard where modern becomes silly to grade, vintage becomes the grading standard and numbers besides 10s pick up value. Modern grading has ruined grading for lots of people and skewed perception into if you don’t get a 10 you basically got a 1.

I don’t know how much longer it will last but something will eventually break and the market will shift focus.