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Strictly speaking, who is losing here? The progressive media elite say they care about fulfilling the market demand of the hidden woke masses screaming for representation, and will whine that normies don't give a shit about lousy shows, but in the end the only opinion that really affects the media elite is their own peers. The hundreds of millions of dollars burnt on progressive shows shows up as a line item on some production companies balance sheet that disappears into a thousand hollywood bank ledgers as accounting aether.
This money was never theirs to curate, manage or be responsible for. Make the highest grossing R rated movie ever? Pandering to incel chuds (Joker) or manchildren (Deadpool). Lose a billion dollars with your female and minority heavy slopfest? The Marvels/WW84 was never for the men anyways and also its their fault for not supporting it so just keep slaying kween, its all good.
Its not like anti-wokeness is an automatic money printer. James Gunns Suicide Squad lost money while incredibly woke Avatar 2 made money, but neither director is playing the media victimization game. For video games Cliff Blezinski and Randy Pitchford are whiners complaining that modern gamers are woke pussies who like the marvel aesthetic, while Kill The Justice League is a flailing shitpile with defenders playing defense for uglified women.
The hollywood elite are all playing social games with each other and burning some index funds capital while clogging up our media with trash. They don't actually care about us, and are not obligated to actually deliver shit the audience cares about. Crash winning an Oscar was the start of the end, and our shows have been continually enshittified as a result.
It's worse than that. They actively don't want the wrong sorts of people liking their shows, because that would look bad to their peers. Trump supporters shouldn't have things they enjoy, and you shouldn't make things for them. Leaving that money on the table is the moral thing to do. You don't want to be that guy who the far-right online trolls like RLM are saying good things about.
You can go back well before Trump or modern era. The Rural Purge was a deliberate removal of still-popular and still-profitable television shows that cut not just rural media in general in favor of urban, but also greatly reduced regional representation. The nominal justification was in pursuit of younger audiences, but the executives also reportedly hated the format/genre of rural-representation, and given that this was during the era tv-centralization in the United States, that was the ultimate sort of cancellation.
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I don't know. I have a sense that Hollywood inside baseball is a strange, insular thing and not really legible to outsiders. Like you said, the execs making the business decisions aren't really risking their own money, and Disney has so many bllions that even a hundred million isn't such a big deal to them. And the artists making the shows clearly aren't that concerned with the aesthetic concerns of us plebs. I'm reminded of that Michael Chrichton quote, where he says there are things in Hollywood that are obvious to him as in insider, but which get reported completely backwards in the news. So I'm inclined to agree with you that it's all some internal status game. But tastes can change.
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