Probably just a personal thing, but I've found a lot of the longer-running comedy shows (SNL, Rick&Morty, Good Place wasn't nearly as long-running but I felt the dip there too) experience a real decline in laugh-out-loud comedy around late 2015-2016. More pop culture references and less character-comedy (by season 4 of The Good Place, most characters were just shells for pop culture references), we reference the same 10 movies everybody's been referencing since 1990, everybody speaks in sentences that sounds like Tweets, etc...

I see this and it feels like when Twitter changed it's timeline from chronological to algorithmic, the Twitter-obsessed-comedy-writing-wave took over, all started making the same jokes, and now are putting those jokes on TV.

I've felt the same way about Rick and Morty this season. Very quick to sell off a moment for a pop culture reference or parody as opposed to a comedic premise. The wine aging crafting a large-scale war that spans generations: comedic premise. Morty falls in love with Captain Planet: reference.

In fairness, simply referencing pop culture doesn't make the show's quality poorer (for what it's worth, I liked the Planetina ep. Additionally, I think the heist episode manages to satirize the genre while still giving the viewer the tropes and references to the genre itself), but the difference between "we're doing a heist story to satirize the heist genre and lay it's insides out on the table" and "it's like Independence Day but with sperm" is where the difference in quality has been crystallized for me.