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Lego's decline began when Lego started shifting its focus more on licensed toy lines of properties that already had a mass following.
In the older glory days mostly highlighted by Bionicle's presence, Lego was more focused on ideas taking risks with new "themes" (really just toylines). Bionicle's era with Lego greatly overshadowed the other cool themes that were out there that all had merit to their value and story and had at least a single spark of creativity poured in like:
>Exo Force
>Knights Kingdom
>The Alpha Team (the ice one)
>Johnny Thunder sets like the Orient Expedition.
These themes all had a narrative in a closed universe that actually had stakes that children could understand with just enough grit that even adults can look back and say: "woah this part is pretty dark" see Exo Force's Sentai Mountain over a jungle. I was unironically ready to cringe reading some of the Exo Force comics but I soon found out an hour went by and I was quite invested in the story, shame it never finished. Has a writer concluded the story in a Tweet?
Is it the last bastion of human civilization on a mountain? Is the jungle too feral and dangerous dangerous for human habitation if they have to live on a mountain? Or when you look at the narrative of Knights Kingdom, and its basically Four Knights on a desperate quest to sabotage an evil overlord so that the good Kingdom has any hope of beating Vladek.
Then there was Alpha Team, and Johnny Thunder simply being generic Saturday Morning good vs evil stories, but even then if it isn't the heroes like Johnny Thunder, Pippin Reid, and Kilroy twarting Lord Sam Sinister and finding an ancient old world artifact to preserve in a museum, you're wanting the Alpha Team to stop Ogel from freezing the world. Or not I mean an endless winter wonderland with the schools closed would be a dream come true to me as a kid.
The spark of creativity and care was taken into these Lego themes and it shows even to this day excluding nostalgia.
