Um, they have moved on from chess. The problem is you are only looking at the highly skilled people. Go look at everyone else, and you'll see chess is pretty much an expert's sport now. Casuals are more or less gone from modern life.
It’s doing pretty well as a spectator’s sport. Look at Hikaru Nakamura’s stream on a typical night. Thousands of viewers. He recently joined a major esports team (TSM). His finals match against Magnus Carlsen was up over 30k viewers at some points.
Now how many of those viewers play chess themselves? Quite a few, I think. Chess.com and Lichess are booming. Tons of low rated players playing all the time.
Another big, emerging phenomenon is Pogchamps, an online invitational chess tournament featuring top streamers of other games. These streamers tend to be very low rated in chess and they receive coaching from IMs and GMs such as the aforementioned Hikaru. In addition to the excitement around the tournament itself, a lot of people tune in to watch their favourite streamers get coached by the pros. It can be very entertaining to see a normally cocky streamer get humbled in chess.
