It seems like the attention to tearing down football has faded a bit. I will say that the attention to caring about the safety of football was much more about simply wanting to end football than caring about the safety of football players.
I don't know about this. I think football had a major perception problem, and it was fix the problem or watch football slowly die. That's why all of the "fixes" so far are aimed at eliminating the high profile collisions that look really scary instead of addressing the statistically much more harmful repeated short collisions along the line of scrimmage.
Football is beloved in this country. USA Today runs a poll every year asking what people's favorite sport is. Football has topped the poll for 30 straight years. Currently, it's football at number one, baseball at about half as many responses, and college football third. It's not just the most popular sport here, it dominates the popularity polls. I suppose there are butthurt people looking to get rid of just about anything because they don't like it, but a mass movement to kill football never happened. I think when an NFL player stabs himself in the heart and leaves a note to please have a look at his pudding brain, things kind of naturally blow up. When the research (that was already being done prior to Seau's suicide) went public, turnout dipped everywhere but in the south. Two different local high schools failed to field teams in recent years, not because of a concerted effort to shut the programs down but due to simple lack of turnout. If you make your money from football, that was a worrying trend. Hence a bunch of rules that everyone whose brains aren't on the line hate.
The irony is that a lot of would-be young football players have been funneled to soccer instead because it's "safer." I'd like to see the research on that. For the same reason that the line of scrimmage is CTE Row, dozens of headers per game in soccer are a lot more harmful (particularly to younger players) than is being let on. Soccer has a reckoning coming, and it'll be a much bigger problem than with football, as heading the ball is so fundamental to the game. They're already not letting kids younger than 11 do it, but that's comically pointless.