The bad conventional wisdom is that people don't like rock music anymore and if there's any truth to that it's because of the tidal wave of truly awful mainstream rock music in the 2000s

FWIW, rock music is very popular, it's just over-categorized to the point that the audience is scattered and lots of things that are popular rock music are not considered to be rock for reasons often rooted in hating working class people or young women

Rock mutates all the time, but there's a gatekeeper mentality built into rock culture that makes deviation from norms appear invalid - but you take the entire parallel history of R&B from the 50s-present and it's all over the place stylistically but we all understand the lineage