That is a good point, but if economic scarcity is the biggest market pressure then hatewatchers should be the first ones to drop the shows. The real hatewatching is in the view counts of Mauler and other video essayists. It's not uncommon to enjoy the secondary product more than the primary.
The recession is a factor, but I don't think it's the biggest. The theatrical side is even more brutal than streaming
(attendance has dropped 50% since four years ago!!), but Top Gun: Maverick and Way of Water are still putting people in seats. Maverick's box office, inflation adjusted, is a hair's length away from the Godfather, in a time when you have take out a loan to buy popcorn and drinks. If you provide a real theatrical experience, people are still going to show up, even for comparatively weak IP (one being three decades old and the other having close to zero merchandising and social media footprint).
There's a stealthier trend that I haven't heard anyone talk about so far. The zoomer audience seems to be separating toward two opposite poles: the terminally online and the normies. There are a lot of 18-25 year olds with almost no cultural literacy in current or former cinema/tv, which by the way is great, but it's a huge change from the millennial generation, which is passingly familiar with Disney classics, Harry Potter, LOTR, Titanic, the Matrix, etc. On the terminally online side, you have people who are hyper-aware about everything, often in an ideological way from the left or the right, but I feel that's a shrinking market. For instance, Disney Star Wars generated immense controversy for some time, but much like the heat from a chemical reaction, that's died off and left an inert, apathetic audience. The Fandom Menace can keep arguing with twitterers and redditors, but most people not only don't care about either side, they have lost all interest in the product as well. Eventually (and maybe we're already here) it'll resemble two hobos scrapping over a dead fish.
The real story of Velma isn't an obvious cope about right wing bait, it's that kids don't really care about Scooby Doo.