I agree with some points in the OP...but I must say a lot of it feels like a good-old fashioned paradoxical "why does no one ever think about [insert thing that every creator complains that no one ever thinks about]" rant. ^^; Which is fine, I guess, but...as a mature creator, I've heard all this before. And I'd offer two responses, straight off:
1) People spend a lot of time talking about characters because it's one of the few things that every comic is basically guaranteed to have. Not every comic will have fight scenes; not every comic will even have environments (yes, abstracted/character-focused comics do exist). However, 99.99% of comics WILL feature an entity doing a thing. It's really as simple as that.
2) If you want to see certain discussions on a forum, you need to start them. =T It's kinda how it works.
People have spoken about these things here before; I know for a fact that I've participated in discussions about fight choreography and environmental storytelling. But not many people start them, and not many people contribute to them, so you don't see many of them.
If you're frustrated with all the "stuff about your character" threads (btw, most of those are created by the same person...we know exactly who you're talking about; you can't vaguepost on a forum this small ⚆_⚆; ) you should put your money where your mouth is and start coming up with discussion topics that invite people to share their thoughts about other things. Otherwise this whole rant rings pretty hollow...it's easy to complain about a community; it's a lot harder to actually push it in a new direction.
So this point specifically...again, I agree with some of it. Like, yes, backgrounds are important elements of visual storytelling; if you're going to use them you should try to have fun with them and get the most out of them, rather than treating them as lifeless obligations.
But...I mean...let's be real here...the background is not always a character. o_o The environment in which the characters are standing is not always 'essential'. Sometimes the same interaction could easily be happening in multiple locations: the dramatic confrontation between two classmates could be happening at the bus stop, or the school hallway, or at the mall. The newest member of the adventuring party could join up at a pub, or a busy marketplace, or on a ship headed out to sea.
And a lot of the time, choosing which location to add into the story can simply boil down to what inanimate objects you want a character to be fiddling with or leaning against while they talk. Whatever you think would be fun to draw; whatever you feel you can handle that day. And there's...nothing actually wrong with that. :T If the comic artist would rather focus on other things, that's fine. I see no reason to judge them for not making their environments viscerally important in every single scene.
And maybe this is a hot take, but I think you can 1000% absolutely skip out on a background whenever you like. When it's done well, the reader will not notice or care (unless they're one of those people who pedantically insist that the background must always be present and consistent down to the minute details because 'realism'...that's a reader you can afford to lose, imo).
The reason many comic artists 'replace things with gradients' (outside of valid stylization) is not because they are lazy; it's because making comics is HARD WORK and you can easily put more effort into a panel that needs it when you save that effort on the panels that don't. The same goes for animation-- you'll see these shortcuts appearing in any medium where an artist will have to make thousands of drawings and spend years of their life just to tell a single story.
And yeah, some artists don't take shortcuts; some will be willing to trade more years of their time for the extra detail, and the level of meticulous work that they want. But at the end of the day it's their choice. And whether or not that choice harms their work should be based on more than just 'they omitted something'. Every artist who doesn't work in photorealism chooses to omit something; in and of itself it's not a fault, and pointing it out is not a real criticism.
I hope I don't sound angry or offended, I'm really not. I'm just pushing back against what feels like an unfair overgeneralization based on a wobbly argument. Like...it seems to me that you simply have a preference for comics where environments are more important-- i.e. action-heavy comics with lots of (grounded) combat. But you've overlooked the fact that they're just not as popular, especially not here on Tapas...and thus, you've conflated "other people aren't using the same elements of visual storytelling that I use" with "other people don't care as much about VITAL elements of visual storytelling as I do".
Those are not the same thing. ._. And I really think you should keep that in mind.