I think it might be a sort of “grass is always greener” situation, where because we can’t know exactly what prehistoric animals were like in life, people can sort of project their own idea of what they think is cool onto the animal, if that sentence makes any sense. Non-avian dinosaurs are so popular in large part because of their size and such, but also because there’s nothing really like them today and thus they’re inherently more “foreign” and thus more exciting for many than animals we can observe in life.
Sure, silly dead mesozoic animals are nothing like what we have. But the problem is that many animals on the planet are still foreign to us (I am not going to put myself above normies, there are still species that I don’t know by heart). Sure some paleo nerds already are well versed with extant species. But many animals that most of us animal geeks are familiar with are still unbeknownst or bonkers to many normies like binturongs. Unfortunately they will always be under the shadow of long dead animals in an age which the species we still have need more attention than anything.
Yeah, this is my 'thing that irritates me in life' -- my interest in prehistoric life declined considerably because of how joyless the competition for total accuracy often became and how toxic the debates often were. Too many people started to act like anything short of adapting the latest random theory was on the same level as denying climate change (this was an explicit comparison) and paleoart was increasingly being treated as a branch of competitive science in itself. Some theories treated as sweeping and factual a decade ago have already been discredited since then or subject to further change, such as Spinosaurus gaining a new sail. For me, the joy of discovery became completely lost in the obsession with being up-to-the-minute.
Yeah, the lip and feather placement kind of debates are exactly what pushed me out, but also things like "if we can prove x dinosaur was a certain way, then y relative is basically proven to be that way" -- I don't know if that logic is still popular but a number of new discoveries seem to be pushing back against that approach.
