Lion? If you’re a human in 40k you’re more likely to be a mangy street cat forced to work in a factory processing other cats into fancy feast. Fuck yeah I’ll be the Taus little pet over that, I can work in at a space turnip farm or something, maybe they’ll give me little human treats.
A lot of fun video games came out that made it a lot more popular. Most 40K fans today have probably never even seen a miniature in person or know anything about the tabletop game. (Good honestly, it’s overpriced plastic crap, only good part about the miniatures is painting them)
There’s also this weird “loreification” of media in the past few years, where stories become less about what they make you feel or make you think, and more about the “deep lore” going on in the setting, and 40K has always been the final boss of that as well. So you get a ton of lore channels talking about it and since it has just so much fucking lore it’s easy for them to crank out videos endlessly.
Its kind of wild that Hasbro decided to forgo that obvious cash-cow with Magic The Gathering and instead just turned it into a slopfest. They could’ve done so much with their own IPs (Ravnica seems ripe for some sort of RPG, Phyrexia would be an awesome boomer-shooter) but that would require doing more than the bare minimum, so…