It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).

Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.

I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.

The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.