It's not clear that this phenomenon (if it exists) has anything to do with the relaxing of educational content norms. If anything, the technological advancements caused by that 'sense of duty and progress' have led to a reduction of the average 'Western' attention span to the point of requiring reductive and trivially engaging educational media. That's probably not really the case either, but it seems just as valid of a theory without considerably more rigorous investigation.

Just Coursera has more high quality educational content than all these silly videos that were ever produced combined. Western society moved forward - unlocking education from ivory tower universities and making it freely accessible to students around the world.

Without going down the "moral decay" debate and with all due respect to the coursera content, pedagogically wise nothing touch old video content (check out also the ATT science brief), like wise for the science books. It is only very recently that we have content producer like 3blue1brown or learnengineering that start to match or even exceeds those.

Created an account just to say that. So brave.