That's a damn shame because I've seen footage of the scene back in the 90s and 00s and it looks very more better and more fun to be in the old FGC compared to the current soulless, politically correct FGC.
Yeah, but it was inevitable. The Arcade scene was dying long before esports became a thing - the culture was going to shift regardless as FGs (and all games, to that end) moved to online venues.
The FGC of old was also not all sunshine and rainbows - it was extremely hood in all aspects. It wasn't uncommon for actual fights to break out over money matches and other assorted drama - which meant it was hard to get into, hard to stay into, and hard to get others into. Arcades never
really made money so there were very few of them - even in big/fancy cities. On top of that - you'd need to find an arcade that had multiple fighting games, which was even rarer. The NYC scene in the late 90s/early 2000s was extremely dire.
Arcades are a bit more common now - but the "main" chains (Dave and Busters, Round1) don't really cater to the FGC or even have Fighting Games at all. Round1 will have some shitty import cabs/MAME cabs for obscure fighting games and Dave and Busters will have 1 or 2 "nostalgic" cabs (SF2, Tekken 3) and
maybe a single new one (Tekken 7

R).
Why did Mike leave the scene exactly? I heard it was because SFV but never got the full story.
I don't know if was ever expressly stated - but a lot of Pro players (and hosts, commentators, TOs, etc) had an extremely bad time with SFV and as a result found themselves in a really awkward position. They couldn't really trash Capcom super hard because Capcom was still throwing a
lot of cash into the FGC through tourneys, events, and sponsorships but they also couldn't really pretend that SFV was anything other than a messy "pretend" esports game that wasn't all that fun to play or watch.
This was also during the "dark age" of Capcom fighting games. Marvel vs Capcom 3 was "OK but 11 years worth of wait?", Street Fighter x Tekken was complete dogshit, and Marvel vs Capcom : Infinite felt extremely unnecessary and like a cash grab. It was really hard to like SFV but it was even harder to like Capcom because they hadn't had an objectively good fighting game release in like 15-20 years. This animosity only
extremely deepened when other Capcom studios got their shit together (Resident Evil 7/Village/Remake 2/Remake 3 and Monster Hunter - World were
extremely well received) after also being dogshit for a number of years.
Street Fighter 6 needs to be extremely good or else Namco is going to become the "King of Fighting Games" after all this time.