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I'm going to reply to you and @Dean in the same message if you'll forgive me, since your points are similar:
From a practical perspective I agree with you, of course. People making their armies have more range to play, authors have more range to write. And, as you say, the Tyranids already exist.
But.
Oldcrons are a much cooler 'force of nature' antagonist than tyranids. There are thousands of 'eat everything, use biomass to make more of themselves, locust-style insectoid' antagonists throughout science fiction and the tyranids don't really stand out at all. Their aesthetics aren't particularly notable and the Hive Mind has no character or backstory that we care about. They work from a gameplay perspective because they're one of the few melee horde armies you can play and 'kill the synapse beast' is interesting for the opponent. Like orks, they make good video-game opponents. But from any other perspective they're basically dull.
Now think about the Oldcrons. Not only is their aesthetic pretty unique (geometric, black and glowing green, almost surgical) but their backstory as short-lived geniuses who attacked the galaxy in resentment for the comparative wretchedness of their existence and then became enslaved by the gods they themselves called up to win their war is also pretty unique. The only other lovecraftian-robotic adversaries I can think of are the Reapers from Mass Effect. And although the Oldcrons themselves don't have character, the C'tan are pretty interesting characters in their own right. One could imagine reworking the Oldcrons to have the C'tan reinstate the crypteks' personalities for more effectiveness, and that might help too.
Nah. Tyranids may be the less unique horror villain, but they are the better one. (IMO, of course.)
Mindless things that kill you just to kill you are boring horror. There's nothing particularly lovecraftian about dumb robots / terminators that don't have a higher reason to kill you- it's just robots carrying out their programming. You may not be able to stop it, but it's not a force of nature premise either- it's just artifical constructs gone wrong, rather than, well, the nature. The C'tan shards were already really just stronger units that could be defeated with artillery or the hero of the hour, and downgrading them to the equivalent of newcron personalities would further downgrade the urgency. That's not cosmic horror, that's just a resourcing issue- there are a finite number of C'tan shards, and when they're gone they're gone.
Mindless things that kill you to eat you are a greater form of existential horror because it taps into primeval prey-dread instincts. They are a force of nature precisely because of how low-level and base the motive is- they don't kill/value you for mind, or your culture, or because god says so- they're just hungry and you're just meat. It's nature at its most brutal, and disempowering in a way that being overpowered by terminators isn't. Additionally, having the elite units be explicitly expendable and replaceable undercuts the triumph of resistance needed for the dread- it doesn't matter if you kill the swarm lord, the fleets in the dark just produce another, and there are always more fleets in the dark to do so.
Then there's the matter of scale.
The Necron are planetary-engineering scale, and outside of some ill-thought 'GW will never use them' lore-only throw-away items, that's as big as they are. The Imperium cracks planets on the regular, so while a Necron Deathstar-equivalent has narrative weight, it is- again- a resourcing issue.
By contrast, the extra-galactic nature of the Tyrannid approach lets them be depicted at galactic-scale. The Tyranid Hive Mind literally encompasses substantial fractions of the galaxy. The Tyranids aren't a resourcing issue because they can be depicted as bringing in more resources than the setting has to resist with. They're not beyond planetary-scale engineering either- that is how they strip planets of biomass and there's the lore-only flesh-planet-thing that was itnroduced later- but for the presentation of horror-via-scale, the Tyranids trump the Necrons simply by starting from a larger scale.
Then there are the appeals to lovecraftian horror.
Oldcrons weren't particularly lovecraft. Or rather, the only particularly lovecraftian thing were the pariahs and flayers- otherwise it was pretty clean and comprehensible. The necrons were murder-bots, made to murder, subject to greedy gods who plotted against them. Which is contrary to lovecraft's major themes of corruptive breeding between pure and alien, incomprehensible motives for which death/madness were a consequence rather than a point, and gods so far beyond us that the terrifying thing is that they don't pay attention to us and our existence will end as a consequence of their own movements for their own purposes. The insignificance of humanity such that C'thulu doesn't even try to murder us is why C'thulu works as a cosmic horror figure.
Tyranids are far more lovecraftian to many of lovecraft's major themes. This includes the interbreeding and corruption of cults, the organic/fleshy/aquatic imagery, and cosmic-scale indifference. The Tyranid Hive Mind does take a distinct difference in that it has a comprehensible motive- hunger- but that motive is itself aligned to the themes of disempowering 'you are not special' of Lovecraft's gods. The Hive Mind is an incomprehensible mind, and we are just in the way of it doing it's own thing for its own reasons.
The tyranids may not be unique threats, but they are both (a) a better force-of-nature antagonist than the Necrons, and (b) were better lovecraftian-horror antagonists than the Oldcrons.
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