It's dancing for entertainment's sake, not for plot sake. How many people enjoy a given fight scene depends on how well it's done. A thousand movies could have

It's dancing for entertainment's sake, not for plot sake. How many people enjoy a given fight scene depends on how well it's done. A thousand movies could have the "hero gets beaten up initially, hero trains, now hero wins" plot series and be wildly different in execution quality and entertainment value. But that's fine. Good, even? If you can turn "John Wick searches for the bad guy in a club in NYC" into ten minutes of entertainment then you deserve to have success. I'm also not as pessimistic about the last couple of decades of moviemaking in that regard either. Some are good, a lot are dreck, but were 80s and 90s action movies all crushing it or do we just have rose-tinted memories since we remember the classics more than the also-weres? Even the article says "it wasn’t really until The Matrix arrived in 1999 that American audiences started wanting the kind of fight scenes you’d see in niche cult classics like Eastern Promises and They Live! or Asian cinema like The Raid and Oldboy" - so what's so unusual about post-2008 compared to pre-1999?