[OfSanguineFire]

> I'm nearly entirely convinced that this is just us millennials and generations adjacent getting old and not wanting to admit it.

No, I have seen an audio engineer with golden ears claim that the industry has changed. He has increasingly been directed to mix with cinema sound systems in mind and in accordance with a current quiet-dialogue fad that filmmakers are following. The broad public that watches the content through streaming with a low-consumer-grade sound system is an afterthought in this process.

[midoridensha]

Exactly. It's much like the music industry (though kinda the opposite), where a bunch of people claim "you're just getting old, music today isn't any worse than in the 1970s". It's not true: the commercial music industry these days is completely different, and part of it is the sound engineering. Back then, they mixed music to be played on Hi-Fi systems at home, and music had very wide dynamic range; these days, they mix music to be played through earbuds in a noisy environment, and music is highly compressed (and the production process is just the tip of the iceberg).