I think if we work one way for centuries until something happens to disrupt that, we can assume an eventual return to the average rather than "new normal" nonsense.
I'm in a similar boat with one of many android app updates on Google Play. Over the last couple of weeks I pushed out updates to dozens of app listings with one app review rejected due to failing to disclose data my app absolutely does not collect. Specifically, a user's phone contacts. An app has to disclose on the store listing that type of data if it's transmitted off of the device. So I have this false positive with my initial appeal denied. I'm not sure how to move forward. Concede and change my Data Safety form on the listing? Insist false positive again? I'm in a bit of deadlock.
Journalists should not be trusted. Articles like this especially, "X isn't Y", should be treated with skepticism and profound scrutiny. If ten media outlets come out with such articles, you can fairly safely assume X is in fact Y.
Observing this happen over a decade or so has been agony. Not just the text reviews and opinions, but the star ratings have gone from being completely reliable and coherent to being exactly the same as any pop movie review site. I enjoy sharing my Letterboxd diary and reviews with my film loving friends, but I find myself having to apologize for the top reviews for a given film after talking the service up so much.
I find everything about OGS superior to KGS except for the quantity of strong players. In particular, its active development, community involvement, and modern tooling all make it more appealing. KGS is very closed source, running ancient software on ancient hardware, very static, very DIY and individual. It's about the game of go and little else. That is admirable in some regards, but not suitable for a growing niche community that is Western go.
Pros saw the writing on the wall, but remember that no bot was even particularly close to pro strength until 2016. Go was dogmatically described as still being decades away from bots being able to play competitively. For some professionals like Lee Sedol, the burning desire was to play the best games and best moves possible. To such an abstract game about intuition, seeing it finally be dominated by machines could understandably be crushing.
Before that, weak amateurs were just replicating human joseki. That's nothing new. They definitely give a player a good start, but knowing which to use and when, and of course how to follow up until the game is over is no simple task. It also happens to be the case that AlphaGo, KataGo etc. prefer simplifying the board state. Remove complexity and win only by a thin margin, because that's all that's needed. Memorizing AI preferences is much easier than some of these highly complicated joseki.
It's become go broadcasting standard to show some AI bot's win/loss confidence percentage for a given board state. It was fascinating for a few years, but now I feel like it takes away from some of the magic of watching pro level play.
I see the point you're making, and well made, but I think it also highlights a distinction in problems between the two. In the case of go, people who want to play go are the main motivating force. In the case of movies, I don't give a damn about Hollywood, the money, the studios, the IP, the actors. I only care about the quality of the film. Maybe the autuer, if there is one.
AI changing conceptions about chess or go is very different than generative Ai which can radically change the means of how something is produced. I'm still going to play go because I love it. Meanwhile, I would happily cut out film studios (as we know them) if it meant I got to watch quality cinema.