>>55112976Anime's decline is more recent. Even as recently as 2016 we were still occasionally getting fantastic originals and solid adaptations.
What killed the industry was the shift in its business model. Marketing to the domestic audience became unprofitable, so rather than focusing on BD/merch sales, multimedia cross promotion and domestic licensing, the industry went all-in on overseas (read: chinese) licensing (mainly for streaming platforms). Now the well has been poisoned, talented creatives have been chased out because they don't want to churn out 17 isekai a season and because their political opinions are incompatible with their new business partners. Once great studios have fragmented into dozens of offshoots divided along lines of office drama, barely making ends meet selling animator slave labour to Weibo and Alibaba and the few good ones left struggle to find audiences as their work is drowned under 120 disposable light novel adaptations every cours.
It's all of the downsides of the VHS boom without the creative renaissance or glut of profitability.