Less of a hot take and more of an informed take, but the fanbase isn't dying, moreso that the western fanbase, despite likely getting larger as a whole due to people getting in from the outside from different avenues, doesn't have enough autistic people as the Asian communities.
New people getting in, but we have barely any scanlators. Barely any new game developers. Barely any new good artists. It feels like despite having more people in the fandom by numbers now compared to long ago, fanworks are still carried by people from the asian side. Japanese 2hu community is a no-brainer, Chinese 2hu community has their armies of gamedevs and animators, and even the relatively smaller Korean community has diamond standard autists like MinusT, Mirae Somang, Riri Zpt, etc.
The only part where we can compete in is we have a decent amount of decent animators, but we got nothing mindblowing.
Which, granted, has always been the case, but you would think with the influx of people getting in, there would be also be a proportional influx of new western fanworks, but it's never really happened.
I think the hardest part that's especially gotten hit are scanlation, or hell just translation in general. I feel like there's barely any doing it anymore, when there was a time in /jp/ when fangame threads had people posting progress about the most random 2hu fangame translations.
At this point, it must just be a cultural thing. The spirit of doujin creation must just resonate better with them. Actively bleeding money and time, just to do something they like doing for the franchise they love.
25+ years of the Touhou fandom in the west, and as far as I know, we never had a "I have zero animation knowledge, so I self-learned how to animate 3D from scratch to make Touhou animations" (minusT). Never had a "I spend an average of 4 years per episode animating this anime series 98% on my own and spend a ton of money, and I've been doing this for at least 17 years, and I'm still doing it now." (Maikaze). Or just the grand fuckton of people from the Japanese Doujin community that have been doing this for the longest time, and some are still doing it after getting mainstream traction like Unlucky Morpheus, IOSYS, Marasy, and Kishida Kyoudan.
The closest we have is Potemki, and the guy just happens to be able to speak English, cause he's Ruski.
