Frequent traveler here, for both work and leisure. To start: yes, plenty of US hotels have eliminated daily housekeeping. It's for a pretty basic reason: guests concluded it actually *isn't* necessary, in most cases. (Btw please don't shoot the messenger: I'm merely conveying confirmed info I've heard elsewhere.) In a nutshell, a remarkably small percentage of guests consider daily housekeeping as an essential, and with the exception of travelers to bona fide five-star hotels and parents traveling with young kids, large majorities across the board do *not* want, or believe they need, daily housekeeping.
R13, I'm unclear why you're suspicious of anything here. I'm not a Holiday Inn fan, but I've gotten that response from most of the larger three- and four-star chains at this point. It's now so commonplace that the front desk clerks don't even mention it sometimes.
In some cases this is due to basic necessity: most hotels are still doing a fair amount less business than they did pre-Covid, and dire changes have been required in many cases for them to merely stay afloat. Business-oriented hotels are still faring the worst by far. Further, note that a lot of these types of decisions are made by franchisees, not the parent company. (In some cases that's a fuckload of properties: Marriott is now the world's largest hotelier, but 90% of its individual properties are run as franchises.)
All that said: this phenomenon is either largely, or entirely, specific to the US. We've *always* been the ones who treat low-level laborers like shit! Hotel maids typically made minimum wage prior to the pandemic, and while few people are even willing to work for the literal minimum wage nowadays, they're *still* among the lowest-paid. In places like Europe, cleaning hotel rooms is an honest working-class profession, and one difference in particular is telling: over 95% of hotel housekeepers in the US are people of color. In Europe, however, it's most likely that your housekeeper – who *does* service the rooms each day, to be clear – will be either a white local or from elsewhere within the EU. Unlike in the US, even a housekeeper earns enough in Europe to support themselves, plus they already have nationalized health care in most of it.
OP, your $20-a-day tip is actually remarkably generous. Kudos to you for that: most people only leave $5/day, and few leave more than $10, and the pandemic didn't change much there. I'm admittedly unsure what you mean about room service: while you're definitely correct about hotels reducing housekeeping, it's been at least a year since I encountered a hotel that didn't have in-room dining, at least among hotels that had it pre-Covid (and note that most mainstream four-star chains like Hilton had gotten rid of it, along with filled minibars, because customers didn't like them). Mind if I inquire where you found a place that eliminated room service?
R15, while I completely agree that resort fees are utterly fucking ridiculous, I suspect they won't be around much longer. They're roughly analogous to cleaning fees charged for Airbnbs: literally almost everyone hates them, but when there's no other choice, there's no other choice. Speaking of which (and finally), Airbnb is in significant part to blame for the continuing hotel slowdown. This obviously started pre-Covid, but people simply wanting less crowding and more "space" (akin to a post-pandemic claustrophobia of sorts) are migrating to Airbnbs & other short-term rentals. (Where do you think Airbnb hosts find home cleaners of their own? Quite a few are former hotel cleaners, now earning considerably *more* since Airbnb requires that hosts pay cleaners or any other helpers an actual living wage.)