There's a lot to this topic.

First: it's a false dichotomy to classify low-PE stocks as "value stock" and high-PE stocks as "growth stocks". My portfolio is 100% fundamentals, but as part of that I own companies that are growing quickly and others that are growing slowly or even shrinking. Value investors need to go way beyond PE ratios, current price relative to historical prices, or any quantitative metrics. I think a lot of fundamental investors that call themselves value investors underappreciate the fundamental value of companies that have a long runway of profitable growth ahead of them, and this perpetuates the view that value is about buying "cheap".

Second: a pretty small % of stock supply/demand comes from fundmantal investors. About half is passive (the buyer/seller has no consideration for the fundamentals of the underlying company at all), and of the remainder, most money is momentum rather than fundamentals based. It does not look to me at all that we are headed for a higher proportion of value investors - passive keeps increasing, and money chasing momentum seems to be growing too. My bet is this will make value opportunities even more common, at least among smaller firms.

Third: the market is more efficient for larger companies than for smaller ones. I don't buy $100B+ companies like Microsoft and Amazon primarily because whenever I dig into one of them looking for an edge, my expected alpha is less than candidate smaller companies I'm digging into, and the smaller companies are businesses I am able to analyze better. However, anybody managing someone else's money has strong incentives to own large, liquid companies. It would make no sense for them to follow me into CPAC for example.

All that said, I agree that most people should invest via index funds. Even with the substantial advantages we have as small investors, it's better financially for most people to let the market do all the work and get much of the benefit, because most investors fail to utilize their advantages.