Serve and volley did not die, it got priced out

The tactic still works when it works; what changed is that the number of points where it is the best available option collapsed.

The usual explanation for the disappearance of serve and volley is that courts got slower and returns got better. Both true. Neither is quite the mechanism, because serve and volley did not become a losing play. It became a play with a slightly worse expected return than staying back, and in a sport with hundreds of points a match, slightly worse compounds into never.

Think about what the server is buying. Coming in behind a serve takes the point away from the returner's best outcome, which is a long rally against a server who is out of position, and forces a decision at the net where the server has a large advantage if the return is anything less than excellent. The problem is the word excellent. Modern return technique, with a shorter backswing and heavy topspin off both wings, produces a dipping ball at the server's feet from positions that used to yield a floated block. The volley that used to be routine is now a low half volley, and a low half volley is a fifty fifty proposition rather than a putaway.

Change one variable and the maths flips back. On grass in the first few games, with a new ball skidding low, the return is worse and the tactic is immediately viable again, which is why you still see it there and nowhere else. It never stopped working. The conditions that make it work stopped being common.

What I find frustrating is that the tactic gets abandoned wholesale rather than kept as an occasional option. Coming in twice a set has value beyond the points themselves, because it forces the returner to hold a possibility in mind, and a returner thinking about two things returns worse at both. That is free, and it is available to any player with a serviceable volley.

The catch is the serviceable volley, which the same generation stopped developing because they were not coming in.

That is a self fulfilling loop and it will take a change in junior coaching to break it, not a change in court speed.

The tactic is not extinct. The skill is.