I understand, but this is still coming off as “being the general after the battle”. I.e. judging the mistakes done by scientists while the available knowledge was more limited. The shift towards portraying dinosaurs with feathers was triggered by, well, discovering dinosaur fossils with feathers. We made a discovery and corrected accordingly.

Of course we should be aware of the limits of studying and reconstructing prehistorical species in general, I’d say most popular dino media downplays or ignores the difficulties and doubts in the endavour, presenting the conclusions as a given rather than as an educated guess, without showing the “behind the scenes”. But the image of “scary, giant lizards” in popular perception has IMO been on the decline since Walking with Dinosaurs from 1999 - of course, the exaggerated Jurassic Park and its increasingly trashy sequels and similar media have had more of a broad cultural presence, but that’s not much to do with paleontology and serious paleo-art.