Title. I don’t follow the anime communities anymore so take it with a grain of salt.
And I swear every popular one is either trying to become viral due a meme or being the same “I’m a loser yet I fell inside my toilet and discovered a new world full of breedable elfs” type… Hell, I bet that’s the actual title of the show.
Also they ALL LOOK THE SAME character art style wise, you know the same pretty clean “digital” style made popular probably by No Game No Life 10 years ago. Yes, I’m sure there’s a hidden 💎 there, it’s always like that but I’m not talking about that 0.5 percent.
I think it’s a mixture of survivorship bias (20 years ago 90% of the crap anime didn’t leave Japan because there was no market for it) and some genuine quality decline. There’s a lot of money to be made in anime, so the safest bet from the corporate perspective is to make the thing that’s been successful a thousand times before. Over time this flattens character design and makes stories progressively blander.
Independent studios can also pump out trash of course, but at least it tends to be weirder, more interesting trash.