I do understand why people may mourn this loss even if, honestly, I think a nicely landscaped median strip creates a nicer atmosphere for the resort than this type of giant animated billboard. If you had to freeze WDW in a particularly time period, then the early-to-mid-1990s would be the time to do it and as more and more vestiges of that era disappear I understand why people may get nostalgic and upset when it doesn't seem like anything better is coming to replace it.
There does seem to have been some effort to update the personality of WDW at least in terms of the colour pallet over the past few years. Whatever people think of it, the bright purples, greens, and yellows of the 1990s are being replaced by a more blue and white-centric scheme that is carried through from the entry signs to road signs and places like the TTC. This seems positive to me at least in principle, as I will always remember finding WDW almost depressingly caught in a time warp when I had a long gap between trips from 1999 to 2013. DLP which was built at the same time seemed to move on a lot more quickly in terms of updating the general look for the resort.
I do look at particularly the new hotel developments and wonder what the thinking is, though. Things like the new Poly tower, the horrible porte cochere of the original resort and new hotels like Riviera speaks to a push to make the resort a more generic tourist destination differentiated by the incorporation of Disney IPs. I'm honestly very interested to know if this all accords to some strategy they have developed internally according to some logic or if they've just more or less decided that the old approach to theming resorts is a waste of money.
See, this is charming! If they announced a new project to roll out topiaries along the roadways of the resorts showing characters, attractions, etc., that would be a fantastic addition that would really add to the atmosphere of the resort. It also speaks to the large, green expanses of the resort, which I think they should lean into as it's something their competition will never have.