What something starts as and what it succeeds at are two very different things.
So you just made up a story of fictional version of Vice being taken over by trust fund Millenials (whatever that means) and you didn't realize that the content you hate was present in Vice from start to finish of its lifecycle (and may have even made its actual journalism possible). And then, when called out on it, you pretended you did know that all along.
It kept its unique voice for a decent amount of time, but it eventually sank into a mode where it was where you went to hear the same things you heard anywhere else, but with a bit more blue language as an affectation of authenticity.
Going from Hipster Mad Magazine to Hipster National Geographic worked for far longer than I would have guessed.