lisp's power came from its default being openness. not just macros or homoiconicity, but how the system assumed you would reshape it. that expectation isn't present in modern languages. today, customisation is an advanced feature, not the baseline. we talk about lisp as a language, but it behaved more like a writable substrate. the cultural part wasn't romanticism it was just people using what was there without artificial walls
so much of programming has been shaped by fads than I don't think you can safely point the finger at 'everything is a dsl' as being a root cause. back when lisp was really being put out to pasture, it seemed like the major complaints were about performance and syntax. and how if it wasn't object oriented then it really belonged in the dustbin (of course ignoring clos and the mop)
I'm sure of that but it seems that LISPs being too flexible hurt their adoption rate somewhat and the mainstream preferred to have more guardrails on their programming languages. Ultimately developers are the ones who decide what they like and popularity quite often reflects what's being done commercially. I agree about the fads part.
