I grew up in the 1980s reading SciAm and still getting old issues out of the library so I remember the legendary monthly columnists such Martin Gardener and C.L. Strong and his illustrator Roger Haywood. They tried the likes of Jearl Walker and Richard Hofstader but they never found anyone who could fill those shoes.

They went from a beautiful spot color printing to the same process color everybody else used. Got bought by a German publishing conglomerate. Looking back I can already see the signs of physics "jumping the shark" because of the articles that came out in the early 1980s that conflated inflation and the Higgs field because... I guess you could in the early 1980s.

I did my PhD and then got settled in the software business and did not pay a lot of attention to SciAm, especially because they never had a particularly porous paywall. I did notice the stupid "woke" editorials a few years before the right-wing trolls noticed them. I had lost interest long before then.

Susa Faludi wrote a book about the "backlash" to the feminist movement which had actually accomplished something. Unfortunately there are a lot of people today who believe in struggle for the sake of struggle and will fall behind a standard that will maximize their experience of backlash without doing anything to help their situation (e.g. bloomberg businessweek runs gushing articles about Bernard Arnault and $3000 a night hotel rooms and $600 bottles of wine but you know they're on the right side of the barricades because they always write "black" with a capital b)

It is a selfish meme though and very much likes the backlash because the existence of the backlash confirms their world view.