There was thread here not long ago when it was revealed that the vast majority of tables on here don't run traditional dungeon crawls, yet WotC with every edition seem to go "back to the dungeon".What are people's goals though? I can't parse that out?? Do people want a return to the 5 minute workday???
As far as I can tell from what has been described (correct me if I'm wrong I'm not a viewer) Critical Role also doesn't run these types of games.
I think the general preference seems to be that the game should work in situations where the amount of combat is determined by the needs of the story or what the players decide to do and not by the needs of pacing.
But also just the general point that people play D&D in a range of different ways and the game really needs to be flexible enough to cater to that range.
I mean if there's one thing that seemed to put off huge amounts of people from 4e it was that it was just too finely tuned for a particular way of approaching the game that lots of people just didn't want to do.