Maybe I'm wrong, but the vibe I get from the article is that Lego has become less creative and more about marketing/profit; sort of faulting Lego. I think this shift to complex, structured sets says more about the parents than the company though. Unstructured/unguided sets are still available.
It seems many more parents today want brag about what their kid did, want some Instagram worthy end product, or instill that structured/conforming result-driven mindset today. Again, I could be wrong about all this. This certainly isn't every parent, but I just feel like it's a larger percentage than the past, just like the amount of time kids spend in structured groups/activities vs self-organizined friend groups running around the neighborhood.
> Now: The bricks still exist, obviously, but now each set contains many odd shapes that are specific to that particular set and do not work with any other creation.
To further this point, there are central components like motored hubs that are only available to specific sets and can't be bought as individual pieces.
A lot of people will point at token actions Lego still does that match the old philosophy, but at its core Lego thinks in sets, and new pieces, new mechanisms etc. are introduced for specific sets, never in the buckets.
Well sure, new pieces and specialized pieces are going to be sold in the set they work with. The point is, parents are choosing to buy the new sets with specialized pieces. You can also see in the article the points about the parents being frustrated while building, sad when the set is destroyed, etc.
So yeah, Lego is marketing and making profit, but it's the parents that drive/enable that. As stated before, we see this in other areas of life too with the full schedules of structured group activities and less self organized time.
There's different categories of what you call "specialized" pieces though. Some only make sense in a specific set (e.g. a light saber piece in a Star Wars set), and some are completely generic but only exist in the sets that couldn't work without them.
It might be different now, but for a while you couldn't get the 4 ports Power Control Hub outside of 2 or 3 sets. You could buy weaker and bulkier hubs separately, but the specific smaller new generation hub only came in sets.
It's interesting listening to Lego designer interviews, when asked about future plans they'll often mention that some development is totally possible, they'll just have to wait for a set that makes use of it.
It seems many more parents today want brag about what their kid did, want some Instagram worthy end product, or instill that structured/conforming result-driven mindset today. Again, I could be wrong about all this. This certainly isn't every parent, but I just feel like it's a larger percentage than the past, just like the amount of time kids spend in structured groups/activities vs self-organizined friend groups running around the neighborhood.