I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers thing and not storytelling.
Over the last decade or two, I stopped watching broadcast commercial TV in the U.S. I began to realize that the choice of dramas and advertisers told me a lot more about what the creators thought of their audience and not so much about life and human relations. Cinema has gone to that same place. Now, a common refrain about a classic movie from the past is "They could never make something like that today", and people who say that aren't referring to easy problems with material like racism. It's not the content. The quality has drastically changed. I used to leave a good movie wondering about my own life and the choices I might make. For a really good flick, I could dwell on the issues involved for weeks. Now I leave saying "Wow! Wasn't that really cool?!?" and I've forgotten anything important or meaningful by the time I've gotten to the (metaphorical) parking lot.
There are little flashes. Occasionally big name stars and producers will create a one-of drama that really says something about the human condition. Those movies are getting fewer and the time between them grows. Streaming TV promised a new Golden Age for long-format serial drama. But the glorious days of a thousand Sopranos are not materializing. Instead it's looking a lot like reversion to the mean.
There is a dead, empty, data-driven blandness to modern entertainment. Not pleasant to end up here when we started off with such promise.