That simply isn't the case. The ballot initiative was meant to stop the wireless diagnostics loophole, either requiring wired diagnostics as in the past or a compliant wireless version. I trust my bank to be able to work securely wirelessly, I have friends with wireless insulin pumps that manage to not get hacked and killed, the car already has these wireless diagnostics protocols built in, they're just not an open standard, and there are a million and one ways to implement a standardized open protocol securely. The NHTSA is simply giving in to corporate lobbying here.
The article seems to use the term distributed computing for volunteer computing. Distributed computing very clearly is neither dying nor fading away.
Volunteer computing is more interesting. There's a constant trickle of new projects, like distributed sharing of GPU power for running smaller LLM models, random science experiments that have you install an app on a phone to collect data, various Blockchain shenanigans, etc. I'm not sure if they're getting less coverage than, say, Folding@Home or the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Seach. So perhaps it is fading into the background, but it certainly doesn't seem to be dying.