Well, I finally took a few minutes to watch Marco's review.
What's ever more clear to me is that there are two diverging groups that are trying to lay claim to wargaming. Marco is firmly in the "gamer" camp. Gamers are more concerned with mechanics and aesthetics than history. They want games that are quick, easy to play, and provide the "feel" of a period. The historical accuracy of the game, and what it can teach you about the period are entirely secondary...or tertiary...or just not even something to be considered.
The second camp are amateur historians who use games as a means of learning about the specifics of a period. They want their games to teach and illustrate - they want simulation. To this crowd, a game that is complicated, difficult to play, and even ugly is just fine, as long as it reflects the history being depicted accurately.
Of course, no one is really one of these or the other; think of this as a spectrum with the two points above reflecting the end points.
Now, I tend toward the second group, pretty far along that end of the spectrum. I'm personally not at all interested in games like what Marco just reviewed. I wouldn't play it. But I don't have any problem with someone else enjoying it, and think, like Marco, that it might be a "gateway" game for other people to learn about and enjoy wargames.
Unfortunately a lot of people in the first camp - which Marco has always been, if you've been paying any attention to what he reviews and what he emphasizes in his reviews - seem to feel a need to declare that the other end of the spectrum is "dead," "too complicated," "full of complexity for complexity's sake" and seem to rejoice in that. They really, really, hate the "traditional" wargame. They'll make statements about how no traditional games ever get played. Just go look at the comments on Marco's review. All of the above are in there. Marco declares that anyone that like ASL or Starfleet Battles should enjoy those games, but realize that they are the "last generation" that will ever play them. He goes so far to declare that a "fact."
You can, of course, find articles going back to the 1970s about how wargaming is dying. I'm not going to rehash that argument here, but what I will propose is that there are a lot of people, mostly involved in playing other kinds of boardgames, who really wish wargames would die. They really don't like the subject. They don't want to be reminded about the unpleasantness of much of the history. They don't care for the racial aspects of some of it. They may well have encountered a less than well socially adjusted player sporting some sort of offensive dress and more offensive attitudes. They have a bunch of reasons, and they may not even really be aware of it, but they really, really would like to see an end to what those of us toward the other end of this spectrum call "wargames." Increasingly we see this attitude crop up in diatribes against wargaming thinly veiled as reviews. In an age where everyone thinks their opinion is worthy of being widely shared, and everyone is perpetually outraged, I guess this isn't surprising. This too shall pass.
It's unfortunate that there are people like this, but I don't think they really represent the majority of players. It's unfortunate that there are wargamers that use certain games to feed their racist, misogynistic fantasies, but they don't represent the majority of players, either. I think there's little doubt that "the hobby" is gravitating in a couple different directions. Frankly, I don't think that means much. I'm not sure there ever was a monolithic "hobby" to begin with.
Stop. Go play. Less yapping, more gaming. A bunch of us are routinely playing 1824 Kriegsspiel 195 years after it was first conceived. Osprey will no doubt sell a bunch of copies of Undaunted. Everyone is wrong, shut up, go play.