Generations before yours said exactly the same thing about all the technology you like. In their day, real music enthusiasts saw the performer live. In other people's time, real musicians used only acoustic instruments. And on and on with the no true Scotsman fallacy.
From what I gather the traditional audiophile argument is essentially "progress should stop where I'm most comfortable with it".
That was a general statement about current mass marketplace and not audiophiles. There are many companies keeping the spirit of customization and personal touch alive. One person I can think of is Peter Ledermann at Soundsmith phono cartridges and pres. What a wealth of knowledge he is. Amazing products. I also will say that one product line which continues to see vast improvements is headphones and I arguably thank Beats by Dr. Dre for convincing the public they should spend $400 on headphones. The audiophile headphone community is still strong at malls across America and major brands are selling headphones that have incredible sound for the price.
It's not that the past world doesn't exist today, it's just that the audiophile market has become more of a niche like other commenters have said and thus more expensive to obtain. Perhaps in the 60's and 70's you could walk into a big box store and find high end audio equipment made by the big guys like Sony, Phillips, JVC, Kenwood, Teac, Akai, Marantz, Pioneer for a very decent price that was targeted towards consumers. They were called house brands. Yes prices have gone down but quality hasn't gone up. For a budget under $500 you can find way better deals on used equipment from the last century. You won't find anything decent built today.
Again not saying that you can't spend $20,000 on a pair of speakers because they are still out there, but the big box stores and big electronics companies including American companies are either gone or they have moved towards the LoFi market. A perfect example I can think of is MSC line marketed for JCPenney. Techmoan did an episode about one of their products known as the VTR Component TV. JCPenney worked with respected manufactures to include high quality components such as Technics. So you were shopping for clothes and all of a sudden, hey what's this TOTL receiver over here? HiFi is not as accessible as it once was, and the repair shops that popped up to service the market that once existed have all but dried up. It now costs less money to buy a replacement when something breaks, so manufactures no longer bother making their products easily repairable. Yes in the past there was junk too, but there was also a lot of well built products being sold en masse to Americans at stores within driving distance.
Not one manufacture can make a decent cassette deck, reel to reel, radio receiver, AB tube amp and pres, and arguably phonograph today at a reasonable price. That's the unfortunate part that if you can't mass produce something and there is not as large of a demand, costs go up. While it is true that you can get better sound out of a smart phone than with a 1970's cassette recorder, it doesn't help us who love and adore our analog gear. Flat screens and tablets can be made with cheap components overseas and easily mass produced, but analog gear requires that you build with high quality components to a higher standard to get decent results and the big players are not doing it anymore. The digital world is perfect no matter what, and so it is extremely simpler and easy to get consistent results at a lower cost to the manufacturer. This is a face of reality that all of us have to deal with. I am now my own technician making my own repairs. I can turn to no one but myself. I can't walk into Walmart or Best Buy and ask for repair advice on ancient equipment. There has been a definite decline in build quality and selection surrounding the products sold at box stores in recent decades. That's unfortunate for HiFi enthusiasts.
