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I'll argue (and have long argued) that it's something upstream; the direction of causality is pointing from a common source. There's a pretty wide variety of spheres where millenial-focused media is absolutely bright-colored, especially where designs and decisions come from the grassroots.
There are a lot of things to complain about in Helluva Boss (cw: lots of profanity, some sexual 'humour') or Brand New Animal, but they're not grey or even My Little Pony-pastel. Look at MMORPGs and going from the most conventional subscription model like FFXIV to the most gatcha-like Genshin they've only gotten brighter over the last decade even as they've increasingly targeted the same demographics. The furry fandom overwhelmingly favors bright and high-constrast to the point where there's a term for hitting it too hard and the bar is high (cw: extremely bad bad color selection). Even the artists who do focus on the greys have a lot more soul than corporate metis. Go into Blue Tribe heavy spaces, and the corporate grey laptops are spangled with every sticker cause celebre available.
But if you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, you paint your house grey. Nonconfrontational uber alles, in the most literal sense.
There's an optimistic story where the growth of spaces to be maximally yourself have lead to a cleaner division between the personal and the public (well, optimistic until you poke at it), and a pessimistic story where we just banned everything and ignored the consequences.
But I think there's a more cynical one: everything adds up to normal, and this is the local maxima.
Chalky, grey-ish pastels are a neutral 'chameleon' color that reflects and attenuate to whatever you put up against it. This allows for ease of decoration when it comes to styling a room without having to worry about extreme color scheme clashes - most people focus on these colors to allow for re-sell value in their houses.
Fun aside, when my parents had to re-paint their entire house for reasons, I was the one pushing my mother for more vibrant, intense colors as opposed to said chalky, grey pastels. She had developed a bad habit of constantly repainting rooms in a succession of ever-worsening colors.
Except for one room, which she never touched - the kitchen, which was done up in a warm, rich, pumpkin-like orange.
After a long spate of harassment(and more color samples than I will confess to - Lowes should have been giving me a commission, geeze), I finally convinced her to go with the richer, warmer colors, and she no longer repaints rooms.
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