"And if it weren't for collectors, folk music (whatever that means simply wouldn't exist as a genre". More to the point - we'd have lost any number of wonderful songs. And we'd have lost any number of newer good songs which grew out of them in later years, from people who had only heard the old songs because of the work of collectors.
But "this strange new habit singers have of slowing songs way down and adding lots of note elisions and embellishments" - that is hardly a "new habit". Whether it is done well in any particular song, or by any particular singer is another matter. It sounds as if maybe wasn't done right for the song you mentioned. But as a technique of singing, it's the kind of thing traditional singers have been doing all along.