Outside shots aren't dead as plenty of teams live & die by outside shots & headers. They just are not as reliably effective for the top teams as elite dribblers who can penetrate a block & cause disarray which opens holes up for their team to slither the ball through to create a high caliber scoring opportunity.
I do agree that we see way too many aimless horizontal passes around a deep block from teams with poor structure to their attacks & little plan for penetrating an organized defense in the final third. But bad coaching almost always leads to bad football, so this has always been an issue to some extent