If I understand correctly, your premise is that since computers can beat the best human player, and other human players can't beat the best human player, the game is dead.
Chess engines have been here for a long time now. It was widely thought that chess would die when Deep Blue beat the world chess champion in 1997 (Kasparov–Deep Blue). Further, the Ponomariov vs Fritz game on 21 November 2005 is the last known win by a human against a top-performing computer under normal chess tournament conditions. This was much before Magnus became the world champion. It's been about 20 years since a human beat a computer but chess is still quite popular.
Your second premise is that since no human player can beat the best human player, Magnus, so chess is dead. Historically, in terms of a single peak time, Wilhelm Steinitz had the largest gap ever between a #1 player and the rest of the world, in 1876, with Bobby Fischer having the second-largest gap ever, in 1971. People are still playing chess in 2024, so, we can conclude that just because no other human player can beat the best human player, it will not lead to the death of chess.
That led me to question when a game is considered dead.
One of the simplest answers is that a game is considered truly dead when no one is playing it anymore. That is hardly the case for chess.
Another possibility is that the game is not dead yet, but dying, meaning the number of players playing the game is decreasing over time. Let's explore that assumption.
The COVID-19 period significantly boosted interest in chess. Most of the world was in a lockdown at one point or another and people had to find something to do while being restricted at home. This led to a renewed interest in chess, a game that could be played while being comfortably at home.
If you are not convinced, here are some Twitch statistics for Chess:
twitchtracker.com/games/743 (click on monthly)
From the graphs, it is clear that there was a significant boost in both chess streamers and viewers in recent years. Both reached their peak during COVID-19. During the post-COVID era, the numbers have stabilized, however, they are much higher than they were before COVID (at least 2x).
Further, you can see from
lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz that there are more than 700k players that played chess on Lichess just this week. There are a lot more players that play exclusively on
chess.com, especially players below 1000 elo, which comprises the majority of chess players online.
As per
chess.com, for rapid, there are about 9 million active players in the last 90 days. (Calculated from my rapid percentile and rank, Number of active players in the last 90 days = Rank / (1 - Percentile))
You would be hard-pressed to find another board game with this many active players.
So, we can conclude that chess is alive and thriving as clearly indicated by the above statistics.