You know, that article might have a point if people hadn't been saying the same damn thing for about 49 years.
It's empty bullshit. No comedy show hits 100%. SNL, for all its flaws, has managed to keep people laughing for as long as I've been alive. Any time the cast changes significantly, people bitch about the new cast, and people bitch about the old cast, and compare casts, and bitch about everything.
I wish I could tell that writer how many times I've heard the same crap they spouted since I was old enough to understand what people were talking about, and how often those same people kept watching, and kept laughing at roughly the same frequency, only to keep saying it and repeating the cycle.
Here's a form of truth. Enough people watch the show regularly that it sells commercial time reliably enough, at a rate high enough, that NBC has kept it going. Which means that in raw numbers, it's one of (if not the) most successful shows ever. NBC as a company does not give a fuck about it being a cultural touchstone, they care if it makes money. And it does, because people keep watching it.
Any bullshit about it losing its path or whatever is a joke.