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Tbh I feel like saying "no u". Decadence is very important - though not the only dynamic, of course - to my view of the decline of rome. If you agree with that framing, you are conceding my point, not the other way around. I agree that there are people pushing an overly hard version that is clearly wrong, but that doesn't make the concept overall anymore useless/wrong than a white nationalist who thinks that blacks are literal apes makes HBD wrong. HBD also isn't the only thing that matters, but it is one of the things that matter.
How did the roman elites fail to sustain their population? It certainly wasn't material poverty. It also wasn't a lack of sex. What could be an appropriate word for having plenty of orgies, yet not create enough children and to rather adopt some successful general who has nothing to do with you?
Why was having mercenerary barbarians fight enemy barbarians bad? If the romans had stayed strong, they could just weaken the barbarians by letting them fight each other, and if the mercenaries got uppity, the romans could put them in their place. But instead, they couldn't, and became dependent on them. It's true that there were other factors at play here - overextension and civil wars - but even the romans themselves acknowledged that once the practice became normalized, plenty of romans could, but just simply didn't want to fight as soldiers. And I can absolutely understand that! But again, this specific part of the story is typical decadence - refusing a necessary service to keep the society you are part of running because you're used to getting away with it.
How did Rome even keep together, if the elite got so decadent? Precisely because of non-decadent peasants and barbarian troops working for them. The former because they, being subsistence farmers and/or outright slaves, just didn't have any other options, and the latter because they felt that arrangement suited them. Decadence is a sliding scale and needs to be counted over the whole group you are part of. If I sit on the couch all day and get away with it because my wife is working and also does all the household chores, that's decadent and bad. But it's only possible because my wife is sufficiently competent and industrious, i.e. anti-decadent. For as long as she is, we will probably do okay overall. But we have less stuff and if something happens to her, we're fucked. That's just fundamentally more brittle than both partners putting in the work.
You may say now that this sitting-on-the-couch-is-bad theory sucks because it has no predictive value. After all, everything was mostly fine despite my sitting on the couch, and once it wasn't, the REAL reason was losing my wife. Which is ... kind of true? But also mostly silly. It's like saying that state capacity is unimportant, Genghis Khan conquered the world despite steppe nomad having approximately zero state capacity as a society. No, it's just not the only thing that matters.
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