D&D has shifted from a combat focus to a roll playing/story focus as evidenced by a recently released module "The Wild beyond the witchlight" where combat is discouraged, and they specifically say that you need to talk your way through encounters.
It has also gone from hard gritty and dangerous/deadly to a big emphasis on your backstory and where it's very hard to die.
I don't really see that to be the case. When we played 1e we read the rules, grabbed a module, bastaradized it, or wrote our own and played it as we saw fit. It was often dungeons, and often had a lot of combat but that was because that part was easy and fun to put together.
I would write puzzles, or traps or non-combat encounters, but that naughty word was HARD, much harder to write because you had to open your creative side and become a "writer", which as an engineering student, was mind blastingly difficult.
So yeah we had a lot of combat, but pure hack and slash gets boring, and you can't have every fight to be close to party wipe, because you want to save it for the end of the night big fight.
What changed was the internet and people looking at what other people are doing, and then getting offended when people were playing D&D differently. Personally I don't care what anyone else in the world is doing, if you want to do a performative art piece or a play, cool, but it doesn't affect how I read the rules and play the game, or how my combat works.
As for "The Wild beyond the witchlight", thats a specific setting intended for a particular audience, that is not me, but just because I want demons and devils and world ending events, doesn't mean that I think a different setting is "changing the game".