Something I've observed and repeated is that most people's idea of "Tolkienian Fantasy" and the modern state of the fantasy genre is actually Warhammer filtered through the lens of Warcraft.
https://twitter.com/overunderwriter/status/1789081592121495861
Warhammer had a lot of fantasy races that were surface-level Tolkien, but included a lot more weird fantasy and Sword & Sorcery elements + fantasy 30 Years War.
When Blizzard failed to secure the Warhammer IP, they stripped Warhammer down to "Humans, elves and dwarves fight orcs, trolls, goblins, and bad elves."
It ended up being a massively successful formula, tho, so they had the opportunity to rebuild lore from the ground up. Warcraft became the bog-standard of Western Fantasy due to its success and popularity.
Because Tolkien is the only fantasy author most people can name, everyone assumed that the fantasy game that had Orcs in it was "Tolkienian."
And because Warcraft was superficially similar to Dungeons & Dragons, which was undergoing a resurgence due to the success of video games via the D20 system, and the Peter Jackson movies dropping, everyone goes ahead and thinks that 3e-era stuff was probably Tolkienian, too.
Normies' understanding of the fantasy genre basically boils down to this: 
This is also why I've run out of patience and will block people who come at me with the whole "Actually, D&D is just Lord of the Rings: the Game" take.
https://twitter.com/cirsova/status/1788287470385213585
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