Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.
From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.
Even more glaring is TV shows, where you now get an 8-episode 'season' every 2-3 years rather than the old days of 20+ episode seasons every year, often non-stop for 5 or more years.
It's not so much about capability/competence as pushing production values to unsustainable levels. You could get away with much less expensive VFX, sets, and costume when filming in standard definition. Now every pixel is expected to look flawless at 4K.
Another more controversial factor is that everyone brings their politics/activism to work and injects them into everything that they do. Now everything has to be pushing for social change, nothing can just be entertainment for the sake of entertainment.
Anyway, stuff like Dirty Harry or a bunch of traditional Westerns are extremely political in the same ways that "woke" movies are (presenting and normalizing certain roles and behaviors, presenting politicized views of history and of certain groups, ways of life, and attitudes, and using caricatures of their political opponents as bad guys), they're just not liberal so that means they "aren't political".
Hell, most of the silent films that were good enough that anyone still gives a shit about them are plenty political, and often (but not always) rather liberal.
Compare+contrast with 'The Last Jedi'. Turning the male characters into total idiots and sending them off on a massive wild goose chase, before the day is saved by completely breaking the physics of the Star Wars universe, making all the previous heroes look like idiots for not using a relativistic kill vehicle against the Death Star!
I don't remember hearing any complaining about strong female characters in the era of Leia, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Major Kira, Susan Ivanova, and so on.