I was talking to a book group last week about short stories. Our book for the meeting had been a short story collection, and everybody was saying that, though they enjoyed them, they hardly ever read short stories.
I might have thought that short stories would have made a comeback by now, due to shortened attention spans. A hundred years ago, when they were a huge part of reading culture, it was because of the popularity of magazines. There were many outlets at that time for pulp, serious, and middlebrow fiction, and many writers depended more for their income on sales to magazines than on book sales. For them to become popular again, I think there would need to be a move toward distributing them as single stories through subscriptions like Spotify and Audible, rather than in print. (They're available in those formats, but they don't sell a lot and the royalties are abysmal. Few well-known authors write for publication in that format and few people read them.)
I don't think I'm wrong about the shortened attention spans changing the market, though, because flash fiction (less than 1000 words) has exploded in popularity during the smartphone era. It's easy to read something that length on a phone. One of the early outlets for flash pieces is called Smokelong Quarterly, because you can smoke a cigarette while you read one...they're one smoke long. Again, the problem is that flash fiction outlets usually don't pay, so they don't attract writers who attract readers.
That's a long bit of thread drift, but so it goes...