It's not difficult to reason why this happened, in my opinion.

People, by and large, lived in cities and were "fine" with smaller housing before the car made it possible to get a piece of the "American Dream™": a nice, 800 sq. ft. (now 1800 sq. ft) house with a yard and a fence. With no reason to use public transportation, cities defunded these efforts, stopped expanding their networks and upgraded their fleet a whole lot less. This put public transportation into a death spiral that we're still experiencing today.

Meanwhile, globalization was causing manufacturing jobs that made MANY, MANY, MANY cities within the US possible to go away. Most of the Midwest is still paying for this: old skyscrapers and other trappings of past wealth are abundant throughout the US.

While this was happening, stock markets prioritized growth above anything else. This lead to many companies adopting, in my opinion, maladaptive behaviors: growth through M&A, regardless of whether the M&A made sense, squeezing quality to improve margin, and, most importantly, finding ways to pay employees as little as they can get away with.

As a result, real wages have flatlined for many people while the cost of living skyrocketed.

Additionally, the Internet has made activities that made very social outings, like shopping or going to the theater, a lot cheaper to do at home, which is now, really far away from the city and is difficult to get to because "everyone" has cars, traffic is soul-crushing, and public transportation isn't viable. COVID combined with videoconferencing that doesn't sucked poured gasoline on this fire by making the last purpose of the city --- working together in a single place --- obsolete for many people.

Finally, there is ample data showing that younger people are not into drinking as much. Alcoholic beverage companies are spending a lot of money capitalizing on this: there is a non-alcoholic variant of every popular beer in the market, and non-alcoholic spirits are ramping up in a big way.

This will accelerate big time when marijuana becomes federally legalized; why get drunk and have huge hangovers when you can have just as good of a time with a gummy or chocolate bar with essentially no side effects the next day? This will accelerate further if semaglutides, which do a fantastic job of controlling satiety and have been known to cause drops in alcohol consumption, continues to demonstrate no serious long-term side effects.

It's difficult to overstate how heavily the hospitality industry depends on alcohol. This will be a nuclear bomb for this sector, and lots of jobs will be lost. The beer industry was the canary in the coal mine. Breweries without restaurants are suicide these days, and even these are struggling to stay afloat.

In short, cars + suburbs + dying cities + lower real wages + increasing costs + lack of public transportation + less demand for alcohol consumption = less nightlife + more "tribal" societies. I think this will also lead to increased depression and suicides (because we are a social species and suburbs make it very easy to be a recluse) and less child births (though I'm one to talk, as my wife and I are middle age and don't have kids)