Many of these are no longer viable businesses, so they do what any nonviable business does and gradually shut down, liquidating all their assets in the process

Many of these are no longer viable businesses, so they do what any nonviable business does and gradually shut down, liquidating all their assets in the process which in this case happens to include the reputation they've built up when they used to be a viable business? So the answer to "why now?" would be, because they only recently began failing thanks to Amazon/COVID/insert your favourite recent civillisational change.