Why do so many forum conversations about the decline of genres, tropes and story content in general come back to this same idea of hollow imitation without understand why? (Not that there's anything wrong with just liking an aesthetic, of course).
And interestingly this is the same reason many people thought visual kei took a declined that it's only recently been picking up from. For those unaware visual kei is a style of mostly Japanese music that covers a lot of genres but draws heavy influence from gothic and androgynous looks while drawing musically (and looks wise) from punk, metal and glam rock, most notably for a lot of anime fans, probably Nightmare, who did The World for Death Note, and Sid and The Gazette who did the openings for season 1 and 2 of the Black Butler anime. However, they're mostly outliers and by the time they came around the movement was mostly consider dead as a lot of the big bands were disbanded, it had fallen out of style and wasn't making money while the newer bands, known as neo visual kei have been accused of becoming all the same and following and copying each other and set formula, having lost the original spirit of the movement that was freedom of expression and confronting the norms of the day (hence the focus on outrageous hair and make up and fashion that broke gender norms), essentially becoming a purely aesthetic genre. And that was my special interest rant on parallels in musical areas.