Puhlease.
I played in Metal and Rock bands in the 1980s. Those bands didn’t kill anything. The arena rock and hair metal thing had run it’s course at the end of the 1980s. There was nothing new to be done with it.
Band’s like Jane’s Addiction were already sowing the seeds of the look and music that was coming.
Grunge and other 90’s music was simply the next genre in music that came along. And usually, it’s promoted as being what killed off the previous one. The way punk and metal was promoted as killing disco.
And I’ve been living in the Seattle since 1990 so was at ground zero for what happened. Bands like Alice in Chains were glammy hair rockers right up to the last couple years of the 1980s. Then they just started dressing more cold weather alternative, slowed down their songs, and all drop tuned their guitars and basses. Voila!!! Grunge was born.
And the music industry dogpiled into it everyway they could.
Now if anyone really wants to go relive the 1990s. Simply go to Portland, Oregon. They are still stuck in it there and their is little hope of them ever moving forward.
Damn Curt Cobain.