While genres have always been a vague categorizing system, it is safe to say that it did serve a general purpose and was for a long time and for most stories, useful.
In recent times however, modern media and pop culture, especially in the 2010's, has essentially killed the idea and purpose of having a genre:
Genre's are being mixed and fused, genre typical character archetypes are crossing over, ideas and elements from one genre are being reincorporated and recontextualized into another, visuals and techniques are selected for aesthetics etc.
Just look at the genres section, how many horror comics take themselves seriously, or try to be genuinely unsettling, instead of spooky, cool, or sexy.
How many actions comics, stay true to the genre and offer fighting, constant chase scenes, fast paced violence etc?
These aren't critiques just observations.
Genre mixing isn't inherently a bad thing, my own story alone is an action, thriller, psychological, metaphysics, comedic, romance, slice of life, schlock all rolled into one, it's undeniably a product of it's time.
However, the absence of focused narratives, and an increasingly pronounced, multi-genre approach to storytelling, has given rise to an immense problem.
That of tonal inconsistency.
Any story can, given careful handling, tackle multiple tones. The problem is these tones are almost always shown in too fast succession of eachother and it hurts the quality and experience of the entire story.
It doesn't give down time for the audience to digest the weight and consequence of a scene.
As such, the inconsistency diminishes the impact of both the serious scenes and the SOL/comedy scenes. It also, and most importantly, destroys all chance for the story to be taken seriously.
For instance, how many modern comics, manga or anime, have a shocking scene followed immediately by a light hearted slice of life comedy scene?
Or better yet, think of your favorite character of all time, then of that character dying or going through a traumatic event. How would a comedy or fan service scene immediately afterwards improve the experience?
And all this is ignoring how unintentionally funny and insensitive this tonal shift can be if the scene prior was dealing with heavy themes and topics, aka abuse, racism, psychological issues, depression etc.
In summary, the down time between tones is important, and it's also important to understand and respect and handle serious themes correctly, otherwise it can come off badly.
On a side note: I suggest that creative content websites such as Tapas, creates and offers more variety of genre tags, to cater for specific, hybrid genres of stories, to make searching for content easier and more personalized for audiences.
As the typical genres don't cut it anymore and this rift between traditional genres and post-modern pop-culture will only grow more with time.
As usual, I'm interested in hearing your perspectives and if you have anything to add, or change to this thread, I'm happy to edit it in.