Yes, that fashion's seriously on the decline.

You never did need a big/120hp bike, indeed you're better off without one. The modern GS BMWs and the like weren't built to go adventuring on, they are designed to go on your usual 70 mile sunny-Sunday ride out, visiting your regular biker-cafe stops - using the inbuilt GPS of course - while wearing >£3000 worth of clothing to make it look as if you'll be heading off along the silk road early next week.

As to seeing a lot more small bikes coming onto the market, that's about changing customer demographics:
In the nineties/noughties the fashion was to whizz around on your race-replica sports bike. Ten years on, those same riders' backs & knees could no longer cope with the riding positions, nor could they fit in the tight leathers, so the industry sold them 'Adventure Bikes' instead. Much easier to pootle around on and the riding gear was far more spacious. Now of course, yet another ten years on, riders are finding those a bit too heavy to get on/off the stand, or manoeuvre around the car park; so the industry is selling them Enfield Himalayans and the like... much easier to handle, but you can still pretend (to yourself at least) that you'll be doing something more exotic than turning up here for another bacon butty and a cup of tea next weekend.

'Adventure Bikes' and all the associated gear that goes with them have never been anything more than a marketing tag; no one motorbike is any more adventurous than any other... It's their riders (and only a very tiny proportion of those) who are the adventurers

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BobnLes

Wow Bob, I think you ticked off most of the cliches there but I have an alternate view.
It is often said that most big bike riders, and especially Beemer riders, are all posers who park up outside Starbucks and can’t really handle their oversized bikes.
I ride a 1200 GSA so I’ll give you a different view.
I don’t know you or your riding habits but I ride multi months long trips over mountains and desserts in far flung countries with sometimes dreadful roads and tracks and I don’t see many bikes doing big trips that aren’t big.

I ride two up with my wife, one trip being 27,000 miles over eight and a half months and virtually every traveller that we meet was on a big Beemer.

Big bikes are just marketing? No. On the trip I just mentioned we wore out one front suspension seal. Nothing else broke and the dealer replaced the seal for free as we were still under warranty. This was a trip that used up six tyres, two front and four back. Nothing else broke, two up.
Before that trip, I’d asked my BMW service boss if I should take some spare brake and clutch cables as I’d read they break after prolonged use.
He said he’d never come across a broken cable.

Lastly, in Chile you will either need a big tank or a supplementary tank as gaps of 200 miles between petrol pumps is common.

The fact that BMW make great bikes for serious travel doesn’t mean BMW or their riders are tossers. That’s like saying Aston Martin drivers are all tw@ts if they don’t thrash the pants off their Astons every weekend.

Try caning around the alps on a big, sit up straight Beemer for a week and then try it on a 350.