Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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While it is a great joke and reflects something real going on underneath the surface, I think you are obviously incorrect about this. This is "How did Nixon win when nobody I know voted for him" level analysis, you and I are in a cultural bubble of people among whom a consensus exists that modern Simpsons sucks.
Quick calibration: how many people do you know who LOVE NCIS?
NCIS was THE top rated scripted tv show for six years, and remained in the top 5 or so for over a decade. It has zero long term cultural impact, but there were lots of people who loved it, who watched every episode, who quoted it at each other, who considered it great writing.
The FBI series, which I find unwatchably offensively bad when I run into it if my mother or my grandmother were watching it, draws like 8 million viewers an episode.
I'm not unfamiliar with hardcore fans being unhappy with the product, I'm a Philly sports fan! But TV is not primarily a rarefied niche, an artistic product that caters to the aesthete and the discriminating. It is primarily slop served up lukewarm to the masses, and masses of people like things that you and I might not. De gustibus, I suppose.
To return to Maroon 5, when I was maybe nine years old Train came out with the song Drops of Jupiter, and for whatever reason at nine years old I was OBSESSED with it. I bought the CD and played that song on repeat. Train is an unspeakably lame, mainstream, trend-following, Nissan-advertisement-rock, corporate slop level of band. But at nine, that was my taste. A Pitchfork reader might wonder who the hell likes Train enough to care about their output, and surely no one really likes them. But at nine, I derived immense enjoyment from them.
There exists a whole universe of media consumers who have little impact within the circle of critics and cognoscenti.
I don't dispute the existence of dedicated fans who will go out of their way to watch certain shows every week that I would turn up my nose at. Plenty of my female colleagues make a point of tuning in to Love Island every week, in part because they don't want to be excluded from the "did you see what happened on Love Island last night?" water-cooler conversations the next day. I'm not suggesting that only shows admired by the intelligentsia or by snooty TV critics can attract a fanbase of devoted, hardcore fans. Probably an outright majority of shows with devoted fanbases are ones that TV critics wouldn't be caught dead watching (e.g. just about every soap opera you care to mention: Coronation St, EastEnders and so on).
But I don't think it's controversial to claim that some TV shows can be sustained by attracting a sufficiently large audience of casual fans who won't tune in for every episode, but will collectively watch enough episodes to keep the ratings up. (Probably most game shows fall into this category.) The impression I get is that this is now a category The Simpsons falls into, with the audience of devoted fans who will go out of their way to watch every episode having dwindled over time. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get.
In an attempt to put hard figures on my gut feeling, it's indisputably true that the show's ratings have plummeted over time, from a peak of 30 million early on to something like 2.5 million today. (The decline would be even more striking when controlling for population.) This pattern is certainly consistent with only the most hardcore of the hardcore fans sticking around. Alternatively, it could be the case that the show's audience is primarily made up of casual viewers who'll only tune in when they have nothing better to do or there's nothing else on the tube.
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