I think for a lot of people, they don't want music to give them something more.

poptimism is agnostic hedonism - music isn't a cause, something to believe in, or even something to motivate you to action or get really obsessed about - it's just about enjoyment, pleasure, pleasantness. the thinking is that by diversifying your portfolio of taste, you a/ increase the total sum of pleasure in your life b/ you guard against disappointment, because if you're in multiple genres then if one goes off the boil, you can just shift to another genre. you can cream off the best bits of all genres.

poptimism as an initiative in the early 2000s was a deliberate attempt to take down the temperature of music discourse, literally to make it less feverish and fervour-ish. it was a move to remove the quasi-moralistic tone to pronouncements about music -  to instigate a strict separation of aesthetics and ethics

now that of course encouraged me to adopt a counter-stance - which was essentially my bi-polar, hot-cold instinctive / neurological approach to music, now defined as an articulated set of precepts. essentially rockism without guitars (or necessarily any relationship to rock as music). (except, except, that the resemblances between hard techno / jungle / crunk / whatever and rock are amply abundant and audibly obvious - Stooges, punk, many kinds of metal.,,, it's just the means of producing those intensities is different from the band set up.)

Breton had this line about the danger of art degenerating into the merely "culinary" and I do think that there's a lot of parallels between poptimist criticism (essentially a post-adolescent mode aka middle aged way of relating to music) and food writing. You wouldn't and couldn't moralize about food really - a meal is either enjoyable or it's interestingly bold / dissonant in its flavor profiles and techniques, or  it's a case of the dish fails. A lot of music writing of this era (2000s) largely consisted of spotting ingredients and assessing how successfully they are combined, the balance of textures and flavors.

Indeed there are all kinds of parallels between what happened with music in the 2000s and the whole rise of artisanal food (and other things - fragrances, soaps, all kinds of boutique 'finer things in life'), foodie-ism, food blogs, all the programs about cooking and baking, or equally, about interior design etc. I can remember the shock I got when I noticed that Whole Foods had started stocking vinyl, and then  almost immediately it was like, "oh, oh that makes perfect sense. Overpriced records / gourmet foods"

Another way of looking at poptimism its pleasure without desire (or at least without the burning libidinal drive of the adolescent, which is then sublimated into or conflated with music-lust). 

That 2000s phase of "culinary criticism" began to be eclipsed in the 2010s by a different approach - a kind of covert rockism concealed within an ostensibly ecumenical eclecticism and open-ness to all (not the nu-rockism I dreamed of about intensities, raptures, ruptures, etc - searched for and found all over the genrescape). This was not the pleasure-first poptimism either though, the solipsistic consumer ego reigning over its hedonic universe. This was pro-pop rockism: a worst of all worlds case, where you treat pop with the same solemn seriousness, left-liberal anxious guilt, and worthy wistful projected hopes that an earlier generation of (mostly American) rock critics went in for when writing about Springsteen or whoever ...  So that would entail taking a release by Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, as a primarily a  text to be interpreted and morally evaluated: a set of political positions, persona shifts or career moves, or as a literary creation (characters, stories, statements, life wisdom)....  The drear business of  masterpiece-spotting.   

So people have gone back to wanting something more out of music than pleasure or thrills or intensities - they are looking for encouraging signs of the times, hope-ful resonances, an indexing of music to politics, or to a construable level of  Importance (i.e. artistic values that replicate the metrics by which literature or serious films have been judged).