I just see that now, but I was feeling the same. It's taking a more and more important part apparently, and players are more strongly divided on the genre than many other variations on the format. That's my impression anyway.
When I search for news, I find more and more articles on JRPGs, sometimes it tends to drown the rest (in the RPG genre, not overall).
It might be that the term JRPG is just a bit redundant now.
I see that Dark Deity has been relatively popular this year (just discovered this during the end of year poll), which, at first glance, one would define as a JRPG.
However, The developers are a Californian based company with a lot of western sounding names in the dev team & it was published by Freedom Games, an American publisher.
So is JRPG just art-style now? Or some mechanical elements? Can westerners make games and call them JRPGs? And other such definition soup.
In terms of taking a more important part and more and more articles, RPGWatch content on Dark Deity was
almost zero. It got listed in the game reviews & comments sub-forum thread & a couple of people replied to it. It had 3 news threads between 17th and 28th Jun 2021, 2 of which garnered zero comments & the released thread saw 4 interested players comment (though one was fluent, who has a reputation for liking everything he sees) and one just said it looked interesting.
But not much in the way of those who played it rushing to tell everyone else all about it. There's no thread for it in the Indy RPGs sub-forum AFAICT (nothing posted since Jun anyway), no threads about it in GRPG sub-forum and very little, if any, mention of it in Games finished or currently playing thread.
There aren't even any threads for it in the JRPG sub-forum. And yet it is getting vocal votes for it for GOTY in a year with quite stiff competition in the AA and indy RPG market from RPGWatch members.
There could be many reasons for this, I wouldn't like to speculate on the many possibles, but it seems somewhat disappointing that we vote as a community at the end of the year and a game is being voted for that the community hasn't really been contributing to the community about. If you know what I mean.
Quoting Blackadder:
Lieutenant George : I don't like blowing my own trumpet.
Captain Blackadder : You might at least told us you had a trumpet.