This seems an insufficient analysis. The meaning expressed by contemporary music, film media, or streaming television isn't very profound, but they at least still make a passing effort to "signify" something. The highest grossing movie of 2024 - Inside Out 2 - is not a deep text, but it does have a thesis.

The "Pixar apparatus" is definitely increasingly consumed by audience demand, but they're at a minimum in a transitional phase: something like Seeing Red would never get workshopped out of committees.

Youtube and other social media (emphasis on media) is ground zero for the decay of meaning into intensity; the ultimate incestuous product of auto-simulacra.

There's no such assumption being made. If anything, the linked article is about how MrBeast is intentionally making vapid slop.

Megalopolis. I didn't love everything about the movie, but it did come across to me as completely divorced from art created to benefit commerce. I loved that about it...

You could argue the movie being made outside of the traditional studio system is case and point of this phenomenon.