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I spent most of my 20s as a 24-hour diner creature. This doesn't make me an authority, but it makes me feel like I am. The pandemic caused most of the 24-hour businesses around me (not just diners) to get rid of their overnight hours. The local diners mostly all failed and reopened afterward with new owners, reduced and much more expensive menus, and much more limited hours. My suspicion is that, long before the pandemic, those 24-hour diners had already lost most of their overnight clientele (graveyard shift employees, EMS, cops) to mega convenience stores along the lines of Royal Farms, Sheetz, and Wawa, so once the pandemic killed the inertia that was propelling the 24-hour service there was no reason to bring it back.
There are lots of factors keeping the current crop of 20 year olds who should be lurking in diners in their homes, whether it's lack of jobs, the internet, or social-developmental damage from the reaction to the pandemic. But even if they did want to go hang out somewhere, I think there are even fewer places left to go than ever. We went to the diner because it was the place that was open once everyone was done second shift. Even once everyone was old enough to drink we mostly wound up there because it was open later than the bars and our cop and firefighter friends would cycle through. It's how we made our friends in the first place. Now where can they go? Not even the local Wal-mart is 24 hour anymore, so that last resort of killing time is also gone.
(As an aside, I knew real human beings who were goths lurking in diners. Dinergoths, you could call them I guess. This article seems to me like the author's brain made the noise "dinergoth" and he found a way to staple it to a concept that, in so far as it even points at a real thing, has nothing to do with either of those ideas.)
Yeah. Somehow I surmised that whatever happened is largely due to the lockdowns.
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