Yep that's precisely it. Coffee went from demonizing auto methods to realizing that some people don't want a 10 minute routine to just get their coffee.
I think it's just targeting "coffee-demographics" by age I would guess. In general, younger people want better tasting but cheaper coffee (e.g. aeropress and pour-over), especially for single users!! Older people want good coffee, but have less time and attention to devote in the morning, and probably need to make more than 1 cup. Auto-brewers become more useful. This generation also has particular tastes for coffee so people are willing to spend more than $200 on auto-brewers that start at $20, whereas previous generations just want a pot of Folgers.
10 years ago there weren't so many options widely known (at least to me) so I was using a shitty auto-brew made for 12 cups just for myself as a teenager, which is really not good. Then single-use machines became available like the Keurig, but it was +$100 + expensive pods. Aeropress was the best deal because it's not sensitive to grind. Filtered pour-over is similar. Good french press requires course grind (without fine powder residue) which you can't get at home unless you have a good grinder.
As people get older, their households get bigger, their morning routine is restricted, they gotta make more coffee. All those meticulous methods go out the window. Even pour-over is too much for me, boiling a pot of water, coming back when its done, waiting for it to lower temp a little bit, pour. bloom. wait. pour. lol, I did things like that in college when my morning consisted of netflix and waiting for class to start at 11am but now I wouldn't do that to my poor body in the morning.
