Spoken like someone that’s never played the game, and the closest he’s gotten to one is his TV screen.
The role of the “enforcer” at the NHL level was never to fight for fighting’s sake. Their role was to protect the skill players on his own team. There were too many cheap shots being taken against the skill guys, with the only consequence being a 2-minute (or sometimes 5-minute) trip to the sin-bin. The presence of the enforcer is to provide an incentive to the cheap-shot player to keep it clean.
Some teams still have one or more, and some of those guys have talent too. Take, for example, Tom Wilson of the Washington Caps. The guy is huge, has at least some skill (with a knack for scoring goals) and protects guys like Backstrom & Ovechkin (not that the Great 8 needs much protection). But the other side of the coin is that Wilson also has a knack for cheap-shots himself, and often hits to hurt. Guys like him are the reason other teams need to come with someone of similar size - as a counterbalance, if nothing else.
As others have noted, the game has evolved a lot since the “Broad Street Bullies” of the 70’s, and teams are younger, faster, and more skillful. So you can’t fill your 4th line with goons any longer - at least not if you want to win. It will continue to evolve, and I don’t see it going backwards.
From what I can tell, the true “enforcer” only came into existence in the 1970s — with the combination of increasingly skilled players, the post-1967 expansion of the NHL, and the establishment of the WHA as a competing league. This resulted in a massive increase in roster spots at the highest levels of professional hockey, which meant there was plenty of room in the game for minimally skilled baboons who would have been working in mines or steel mills before the 1967 expansion.
The proliferation of U.S.-born and European players that began in the 1980s slowly pushed those marginal players out of the game.