The decline of Scientific American into pop science started much earlier than that. I'd peg it around 2000, when they changed the cover design and stopped running classic columns like "Mathematical Games" and "Amateur Scientist". The pop-science articles started ramping up around the same time.
Same thing with Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, science reporting was the first to go in the death of journalism. They were terrible 15 years ago, maybe people didn't notice until recently when they started bizarrely endorsing politicians like Biden and running CRT articles.
