I think part of it is that "real-time with pause" was intended to model that faster characters could do more actions, but it was always a pita for players so they had to keep adding more and more auto-pause options, which made them effectively turn-based already, so why not get rid of the real-time mode becuz nobody actually played it in real-time anyway?

Add that there's the perception that in a "real-time" game that if you order an action it should be executed immediately, but most "rtwp" systems included internal cooldowns (again, emulating turns), so it was all too easy to make an order, have an auto-pause event trigger, not realize it was from a different character, so change the order and not have your original thing happen and mess everything up, which also adds to player frustration.

So, I guess my tl;dr is that I think that "rtwp" is just a clunky form of turn-based that doesn't really work very well and no one is fast enough to be able to play an actual real-time game of this type, so... turn-based is the only way that's really effective and reduces or eliminates the clunkiness of auto-pausing happening at random times due to differing cooldowns and/or character speeds.
 

I suspect following reasons, among others:
- real time with pause once was one of the few ways to inject action into RPGs and to bring them closer to action games. Today, action-RPG audience has a lot of more action-oriented genres (third-person shooters, first-person shooters, slashers, twin-stick shooters etc) to choose from
- gamer audience growing older, not interested in twitchy action anymore
- turn-based roguelikes and board games gaining popularity
- demand for strategy games on home consoles (and, to lesser extent, portable consoles). And real-time strategy controls on consoles aren't nice, so that leaves us with turn-based
 

The Baldurs Gate turn based system that spawned Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, etc. is coming back into style because of that generational thing. Gamers getting older want to pass on some of their favorites to the next generation, and some of those old games are getting another chance again due to Steam.

It doesn't hurt that Obsidian (creator of Pillars of Eternity) went Kickstarter with that game as a chance to get back to their roots with a game and system they knew well. And that Larian is doing BG3.
 

This war has been ongoing since the Infinity Engine popularised real time with pause. Some of us hated it from the start and it seems our voices are now being heard.

For me the biggest issues were (1) pointless extra clicking to make it quasi turn-based, and (2) not having control over pathing, for which the AI was invariably terrible. The only Infinity Engine game I played for more than a few minutes was Planescape:Torment, and I wasn't playing that for the combat.

A version of it ('Superhot'-style) can work quite well in games with a single player character, though.
 

I wonder if the XCOM games should also be getting some credit here for bringing turn-based tactics back into mainstream gaming.