Actually, I genuinely think it's the opposite. There are huge swaths of interesting stuff "out there", but the "majors" mostly ignore it, so it doesn't get the attention it deserves. Fallout from the proverbial "long tail" delusion. As a life-long musician I can say without a doubt that the "music industry" is to blame for the phenomenon you're talking about. But what they're hocking represents only a tiny fraction of what's really out there. Just a few months ago I trekked down to the absolute worst part of town (and my "town" has a notoriously bad "worst part") to see Black Midi. It was an insanely, outrageously fantastic and exciting show. And what was possibly even more exciting is that the show was absolutely packed with folks, young and old (though mostly young). So people are paying attention, and I think many feel your pain and frustration. So there are plenty of options out there, and I think more are emerging every day. It's just a matter of tracking them down, because you're not going to hear about them through the major labels, and certainly not on the radio.
I also don't think it's necessarily the musicianship, or lack thereof, that's the problem, but the "requirements" of the modern mastering process. Compression for streaming has become a kind of dark art—in the standard colloquial sense, but also in the sense of just being... well... dark. It serves purposes that are not those of music, but rather those of commerce. It's inherently cynical, fiercely competitive, and homogenizing. Cynical in the way only a proper music industry "guy" can be. Simon Cowell is probably the poster boy, but the industry is populated top-to-bottom with them. These days, I'd say that small minded fuckwit who runs Spotify is their Uber Lord...
Anyway, I realize you added an appropriate number of caveats to your article, but I just wanted to mention that I've found lots of interesting, dynamic, and "human" music out there. And even lots of music that is purely synthetic and (at least partly) algorithmic, which nevertheless manages to have a heart. But it takes a lot of digging around. It's a question of the musical conception, I think. If that conception is driven by a marketability requirement, or by simple competitiveness, then the music itself suffers. But of course, those motivations are shared by so many that it has become a kind of lingua franca in itself—the language of greed and desperation—and it "speaks" to people on a certain level. It speaks to their own cynicism, competitiveness, and sense of insufficiency. Perhaps not exclusively "modern" problems, but certainly at fever pitch in the social media age.
