Being a young person, I have to say, it seems to me that there's been a lot of poorly thought out sentiment here, mainly from the older (I assume) that seems to be only listening to what comes out in the charts, and making their assumptions from that. I have to say, in my opinion at least, there hasn't been a pop song worth listening to that's made it into the charts in a while (not to say there haven't been decent songs in the charts, just not pop), where pretty much everything, not just the bass, was made using synths or programming. I think the lack of traditional bass guitar in this sort of crap is due to it being easier to make big bass sounds on a synth, than having to spend some actual time getting a great sounding bass tone on recording.
If you want to here some decent bass, don't listen to pop, for the most part you're only going to be disappointed. All of this being my opinion, of course.
Edit: Also, if I ever go into the studio, and the engineer mentions anything about mixing for phone speakers, or some other horrendous listening platform, I would not be best pleased.