I think he's absolutely right, along with everyone who argues that cinema is changing.
When I go to the movies now I don't see people looking to have an experience. I see them giving snide remarks to their friends, intentionally laughing at inappropriate times to make themselves look superior to what they're watching, or playing on their phones. Like music, these things have become background noise to us, and the number of filmmakers relying on the same old techniques is insanely high. Just watch this video:
SOOOOO many movies cover emotional beats the same way now, which lets them take all kinds of storytelling shortcuts because, rather than organically crafting a moment, they just have imitate other movies and rely on your emotional memory of them to get a reaction. While this does mean that we're a pretty cinematically literate society, it also means that we can easily be duped.
There's a point in the article where Scorsese discusses the 50's, which is a decade I've been thinking about for a while now because of how similar it is to the present. Theater attendance was insanely low back then because of the introduction of television, which kept people at home rather than going out. What innovation do we have today that's similar? Streaming. Netflix, Hulu and, for younger generations, YouTube are keeping people at home once again. They only come out for franchises, which are essentially serialized TV on a larger scale.
What saved cinema was the filmmakers of Scorsese's generation. Hollywood noticed they were failing to bring in audiences and appeal to the Boomer generation, so they recruited from film schools, where we got Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola, Cimino, De Palma, etc. As a result, we had new, young perspectives who appealed to younger audiences and brought in revolutionary ways to tell stories visually.
However, now we're like the 50's, with streaming keeping people at home. It's not entirely the same, but very similar. We just need to wait to see if any revolutionary filmmakers arrive (some I'm watching are Shane Carruth, Ava DuVernay, and Ryan Coogler) to revive cinema, or we'll just waitch it continue to fade into the background.