>>784075>Fantasy peaked with Tolkien, because Tolkien didn't intend to create a genre, but simply to create a mythology for the anglo-saxonsYou're acting like there aren't legions of well-off writers, that publish their own sprawling worldbuilding materials.
>most of the next fantasy writers haven't even read Beowulf, the Odyssey or the Illiad, without any reading, no great story can be written.If these works were what specifically lead to the creation of Tolkien's books and others, that are revered by their respective genres, the things that were compelling about their ancient predecessors should still be found within them. There is nothing to suggest understanding the works of Tolkien couldn't lead to someone writing fiction of equal quality, except some misguided notion of historical or societal purity.
>muh talentLike any creative work, a book is often not well received particularly for the authors writing skills or sometimes even in spite of them, for example it is widely agreed that Isaac Asimov's prose is relatively lackluster. The variation in craft also makes it hard to pinpoint what "good writing" exactly means, except by superficial metrics like vocabulary or on an argumentative case-by-case basis.
I think your view of the past is biased through curation, not only the fact only the most highly regarded of past works are preserved, also the incessant splintering of literature into micro-genres ( compare "magical realism" > sth-"punk" > "mechsploitation"; ao3 trends are now genres). It is genuinely hard to find the worthwhile stuff, not only because genre authors are incentivized to optimize for output. Yet in almost every genre, there is something compelling, which makes people think, and for each piece of low-quality dreg, there is a better book it draws from and may be a better book inspired by it in the future.