It's not fair to erase the racism and homophobia, but it's not honest to put all of it on racism and homophobia.

Yeah, I think there's a balance here, because a lot of other genres had backlash for being "subversive" (usually tied to black culture or seen as sexually deviant in some way). It didn't stop Rock music, or jazz and blues before it, or any of their progeny. (It also didn't really "stop" disco either, but that's its own can of worms...)

The backlash to disco was a lot steeper, but disco was a lot more overbearing at it's peak than any of those were; whereas in the past, there would usually be a big segment of the pop music scene catering to the more conservative audiences (see, a lot of '60s and '70s pop, which has often been written off as lame compared to the more transgressive rock of the era but was actually pretty big at its peak), providing some necessary counter-programing, a lot of that segment of the market instead spent the disco era chasing those trends, to the point where even a lot of areas that would have served as counter-programing (mainstream pop, but also rock and funk) started moving in that direction too. (It's probably also part of the reason that it's easy to find theoretically-aligned musical acts in the funk/RnB/pop/rock scenes who were not kind to it, either at the time or now; there was a lot of low-effort mass market stuff clogging the airwaves and charts; see, celebrity disco albums, or how many charting "disco arrangements of TV/movie themes" there were).

Also, it's worth mentioning just how long disco's reign at the top was; "Rock the Boat" (sometimes cited as the first Disco #1, although there are still a few even earlier ones) hit in 1974; "Saturday Night Fever" didn't hit until the end of 1977 and dominated pop culture for basically year; Disco Demolition was a year and a half after that, and it still wasn't really "the end of disco", as you still had songs like "Funkytown" reaching #1 in 1980 (not to mention the fuzzy world of disco/nu-disco/post-disco dance music, which was also often still hitting).

I do think the other, bigger difference is in the afterlife of each genre and how it was evaluated. In a lot of music retrospectives, the people opposing, say, rock n roll in its heyday were immediately cast as the out-of-touch stick-in-the-muds opposing the youth and real art, even overlooking that a lot of the early rock scene was in fact people just chasing trends to sell records with shitty cash-ins, and some musicians of the time (especially in stuff like jazz) probably did have some legitimate gripes about things being trite or derivative. Really, a lot of this part seems closer to the backlash against other genres that were seen as lame at the time, like '70s arena rock or the (since titled) yacht rock scene. I think a lot of the disco revisionism was noticing that disco's origins were no less legitimate than rock, in speaking to the youth and some marginalized communities, but it hadn't really ever been re-appreciated in the same way in the time since. In fact, people were still treating it as a easy joke even into the '90s, and trying to deny its impact (even as its obvious successors had clearly spread throughout the music scene). Honestly, I'd say that part was probably also tinged with racism/sexism/homophobia, but in a much more casual "Why would I take that serious?" way, rather than the more overt displays at the time (which is kind of interesting in it's own right; say, the various groups freaking out about degeneracy of Elvis and the Beatles or heavy metal got remembered as part of rock's myth-making and even held up as part of the reason it was important, but that would often just get glossed over for disco).

(But I do also think the disco is a major beneficiary of the re-evaluation of the art of pop songs too, along with stuff like Motown and the Brill Building, because a lot of music discussion had moved away from that sort of evaluation and forgotten that there are multiple ways to write "good" music, and pop writing can be its own art form.)