I interpreted the OP as complaining not that romance took over specifically his subgenre of fantasy, but rather it has taken over bookshops and related venues completely.

You can see this on Goodreads, which in decades past saw active community about all kinds of literature, but now is overwhelmingly centered around romance and romantasy novels. There must still be a lot of people out there who read other stuff than romance (or genre fiction in general), but I'll be damned if I know where they can hang out and feel community online, let alone IRL. Literary blogs are few and have largely retreated into Substack, which is a pathological for-profit corporate platform. Goodreads is declining because its old tech was less attractive to younger readers. Competitors to GR like Storygraph tend to be designed mainly for fiction instead of the full range of things an erudite person might read.