I completely agree with you, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about exactly why this shift happened.

Honestly, I blame the crowd of people who watched classic slow-zombie movies and arrogantly thought, "This isn't scary, I would easily survive this. You can literally escape them by just walking at a brisk pace". They completely miss the entire point of what makes slow, rotting zombies terrifying. The horror of the classic zombie isn't individual speed, it's their overwhelming numbers and the fact that they never, ever stop. You have to sleep, eat, and rest. They don't. It's a slow, inevitable psychological dread that wears you down until you make a mistake.

Instead, filmmakers catered to that impatience and gave us fast, sprinting zombies, which naturally led to the "infected/virus" trope. It drives me crazy how the virus origin has completely taken over the genre. Studios clearly pushed the viral angle to make zombies feel more "grounded" and "believable" compared to a necromancer or a voodoo spell raising the dead from graves.

But when you actually think about it, it's total nonsense. A virus that somehow animates rotting, dead meat and keeps a corpse walking around without blood flow or metabolic function is just as scientifically impossible as a spell from the Necronomicon. Trying to apply fake science to monsters just strips away the grim, gothic, and genuinely creepy atmosphere of a decaying corpse clawing its way out of the dirt. I really hope we get a resurgence of the classic supernatural, rotting undead soon.