I wonder - does it matter?

If any style of music has merit, someone, somewhere, will enjoy it, play it sing - pass on the stuff to other people. If not, then it will lie fallow until someone does. My view is that what goes around comes around - perhaps with a different generation as the catalysts and in a different format and environment.

It's not as though, in this day and age, folk music - however you define it - will get lost as it might have done in the days of Sharp, Grainger, Broadwood, Vaughan Williams et al. There are dozens of written and recorded versions of folk songs in archives, on CDs, on YouTube, on Spotify - for example - so that anyone with a yen for the music can dig into it and perhaps rediscover it afresh.

Music popularity fluctuates - but you can be sure that the "youngsters" are busy doing their own thing. And, as long as you, whatever age you are and whoever you are, can do your own thing, why worry?