"What I heard was that the carols had been taken over by folk revivalists and was more about them than the local communities. Looking at that link that doesn't seem to be so much the case, though that was some time ago"

Ian Russell runs a carols festival every other year, with workshops that teach the carols. That is attended by a lot of revivalists, but it has also helped to re-introduce carols from the surviving manuscripts, some of which had previously fallen out of the repertoire. But that's only one day, every other year. The pubs that host carols are rammed for four or five Sundays leading up to Christmas, and it's a real mixure of locals and folk enthusiasts. (Sometimes the two things are not mutially exclusive.)