Of all the things young people could have latched onto, it's the decade of the great recession almost no place on earth really recovered from, a head bozo in the US that's somehow popular but turned the world into his personal drone playground, while the empire continued as it did.
It was the decade every social movement failed in, and mostly retreated back to moralistic forms of liberalism, just as every equally moralistic right wing reaction grew exponentially, leading to the current issues.
It was the decade climate change was decided to be fixed through a bunch of treaties worth less than the paper they were written on.
It was the decade of the start of the return of the malaise of collapsing empires. Poverty, hunger, climate change caused disasters. War had not went away, but resistance to it did.
Plus, pop culture (the thing most of the nostalgia is directed to - the eternal "It's Christmas ~~1996~~ 2013 and my parents got me ~~a Nintendo 64~~ the new Call of Duty" of obnoxious liberals) sucked ass.
So what about the 2010s are the youth nostalgic for? I don't spend a lot of time around older children and there isn't really anything that comes to mind for me that you'd be nostalgic for.
Flimsy reason but the latter half of the 2010s looks better in retrospect compared to the world after 2020.
MTV used to have a niche/retro game review section and music videos. That was the best part for me in late 2000s-2010s
The particular trend that prompted this rant is me reading posts about why the 2010s nostalgia in pop music - the return of electropop etc., and it being a bunch of annoying redditors praising Obama etc.
Always thought electropop was more of an 00s thing.
All I can remember from the 10s music wise is Maroon 5, Imagine Dragons, Katie Perry and dubstep.
Tail end of the 00's was solid for music -- LCD Soundsystem in particular, and their live album came out in 2014 as well. However, broadly, it's not great. Still, empirically, the 90's still hold the worst:
https://www.avclub.com/did-1997-contain-the-worst-two-weeks-in-music-history-1798265017
A wonderful bit from that essay though: