Nah, I think it's more the other way around. The 80s brought a lot more independently produced films thanks to video, and thanks to video people could also watch more films from other countries as well as older films. So, in effect, people just haven't seen "the same" films as much as they did in previous decades, so the general "consensus" that existed about all the decades before the 1980s, the general waay of talking about what films one had seen, and what were valuable films and what were films that could be neglected, got lost. After the 1980s there isn't any real general idea about decades and "what they were about" anymore: people aren't telling the "same" stories about the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, but everyone had and has a much more individual(ized) experience now.
Because of that general shift in what audiences watched, the 80s became this kind of myth of a "lost decade", where people started saying, "it's ok if we don't have a general idea about that decade, because nothing worthwhile was going on", and somehow everybody agreed to identify the decade with the US, Reagan and blockbuster films and action and horror films, and ignore everything else.
But honestly, this must be the worst thing about my filmwatching: all those hundreds of terrible films from the 21st century I had to sit through because of friends, partners, festivals and my own laziness... 
