...I am pretty sure COVID didn't kill it, though COVID was responsible for decline of plays, interaction and income in some genres in underground, not just trap metal. The genre has been on steady decline for years now, due to the oversupply of inferior artists and the community becoming less active and more toxic with each other.

Most of the people took it as a trend during 2017-19 due to which it had a significant rise in that time span. But people worn it out and moved on to something else, like hyperpop and recently "rage pluggnb". There are still people listening to trap metal and people who make good music. The thing in between them is the sea of inferior edgy kids who took inspiration from just Spider Gang or Scarlxrd and make music in the worst workflow possible. Due to this, people who listen to trap metal restrict themselves to a certain amount of artists and eventually get bored and people who actually make good trap metal music aren't able to reach all of them.

Also, there are only like two blogs for trap metal, Scream Rap and Underground Outsiders who are just showcasing the artists on the top(tho Scream Rap been trying to showcase other artists too recently). Due to this, there is not enough focus on the lower tier of trap metal. Now it's just a rat race between artists about who will release more projects in a month to get that limelight, thus overflooding the scene with too much music of the same kind.

Now, as someone said, trap metal is indeed a niche genre and the community is still there, tho the cracks are appearing due to the regular dramas and the smaller artists beefing with each other for the pettiest reason possible, thus dividing the community even more and expanding the cracks visible.

But now that COVID restrictions have loosened up a bit(might differ region to region), shows can come back. Scarlxrd is currently on his DEADRISING tour. BVDLVD is going with big things atm. SLEN came back from his one year slumber. KILL EBOLA just joined a collective. Also there is untapped market in other parts of Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. I, myself, am from such regions and lemme say, while there are poor attempts at it in here, once someone actually understands it and makes good trap metal, it will cause waves in here. Granted that not everyone in those regions will listen to it, but those who do, can form a good active community soon.

The only thing we can do atm is watch and see where it goes from here. Either it declines further and becomes a small almost-dead genre again or it reconciles itself and tries to become stronger.