Wetherspoons are the Sam Allardyce of the pub world.
In the early years of the millennium, they were ahead of the curve. The pubs did a lot of things that people take for granted now, non-smoking areas, being open all day, permitting kids (and having a kids menu), serving food all day, service a range of soft drinks - even accepting card payments at the bar wasn't something you could assume would be okay twenty years ago. These were the days before you could guarantee a range of sandwiches being sold in a dozen places on every High Street, there wasn't much "middle ground" between Greasy Spoon cafes, McDonalds and pubs (which were open for a few hours a day and you were lucky to get much more than a packet of crisps). A Wetherspoons offering two meals for a fiver (or a pint and burger for around the same £2.99 price as a McDonalds "meal") filled a gap in the market.
Back then Allardyce seemed a groundbreaking manager - things like getting players to eat pasta, analysing matches with videos, using stats to try to squeeze an extra 1% out of players. Now, all football clubs have caught up with these things (what was once "revolutionary" is now typical behaviour even at non-league teams) and Allardyce feels like a dinosaur.
Similarly, Wetherspoons no longer feel so "unique", other pubs now offer food all day long, smoking is no longer permitted inside them, the worst pubs have closed and the ones that remain have evolved to copy the 'Spoons model.
I still use them from time to time but they've lost their raison d'être, plenty of other places do some of the same things much better. It's maybe a generational thing but they seem to be filled with a lot of all day drinkers - maybe that's a good thing (better to have such people socialising together rather than drinking at home alone, better that they do it in a pub than on the streets, better to have drinkers watched by bar staff in case of troubles) but it does make some of them pretty off-putting compared to a decade ago.
Worth popping into when in an unfamiliar town - I've visited hundreds over the years when on rail journeys - but they feel a bit Allardyce-like - living off past glories - once they were the future but now the rest of the world has caught up and now does things better - there's a time and a place for a Wetherspoons but the political stance of the owner seems to have shown the demographic of people who they want to attract - no Liberal Metropolitan Elites wanted at the bar