Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect.
All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.
In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models". This means that the piece count in most sets is inflated by a majority of small "finishing" pieces. The models are finicky to build with lots of unusual building techniques (attaching bricks on sidewalls, for example) and are not easy to repurpose into something else in a reasonable amount of time.
In the 1990s, it was a "construction toy" first, playset second, display model last. A kid could take any set and rebuild it into something else in an hour or so. Now, they would need more time only to sort the tiny 1x1 pieces before starting to build anything.
> In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models"
I think there is an actually an "addition" here rather than a change. You're an adult conversing with adults (I assume) and therefore the discussions you have and the marketing you see are more about sets targeted to AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego).
The classic Lego childhood lines (Lego City) still exist and still work just as well for play and creative construction as they ever did - and they don't use a lot of 1x1s. It's just that we've also gained these new lines of large adult sets that never used to exist.
Even the vehicles in 5+ City sets are affected by this trend. It takes about 50 parts stacked in intricate ways just to build the base chassis structure of a van, for example.
In the 1990s, Town vehicles were 4-stud wide and didn't focus on the small detailing. The instructions for the original vehicle were just a single sheet of paper with less than 20 steps. You could build the original vehicle by memory after having built it a couple of times with instructions. The back of the box suggested alternative builds, which, although looking "imperfect" were a solid base for imagination.
Once they've got a few sets like that, the rebuilding into unspecified stuff seems to come naturally (at least with the cousins and friends kids I've played with).
Those complex sets are great for stimulating certain types of spatial reasoning, perseverance, and fine motor skills. My four year old went from 'building a tractor (60287) with dad helping' to 'building 5+ kits all by himself'.
The kits don't stop him from just building his own stuff either. The two forms of play seem complimentary.
See, I love all those detail bits. I love to make tiny, intricate models that say a lot in a small space. I love grabbing a couple of random gribbly bits, sticking them together, deciding they look like the beginning of something, then sticking on more bits to make it more like the thing.
The "voxel sculpture" style where you just stack (mostly) rectangular bricks into a shape is perfectly valid, but it's less interesting to me personally.
Modern Lego supports both. Both are valid. They still sell big brick buckets, and no one's stopping you from buying one of those and doing your thing.
What I'd really like to see is a "brick bucket" that contains mostly large bricks and maybe a few doors, windows, and slanted tiles. I'm all for gribbly bits, but it seems harder to accumulate a good collection of the basics these days - because the big "brick buckets" you describe are probably half gribbly bits. In my experience as a kid, what we really wanted was enough mass to build walls and houses and forts, and were not as interested in small detail stuff.
That looks pretty good actually, but now I'm going to move the goalposts and wish for a similar box with less color variety so that you can build, for example, a white house with a red roof, instead of having to cobble together various colors.
Still though, I just might have to top off the kids collection with one of these boxes. Good find.
Lego nailed it in 1980 with the 8860 Auto Chassis, IMO. It does all of those things in a nice balance with piece count of 662 (for a 57 cm long car) and IMO still ends up looking better than today's 3000 piece models.
The 1x1 sticker tiles sort themselves by granular convection [1] to the bottom of a Rubbermaid tote just like the sunflower seeds in a snack mix. In our house, they frequently get neglected except as gems/coins/treasure to fill a pirate chest. The large plates and bricks float to the top during shaking and digging.
Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect.
All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.