Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college. This has almost nothing to do with what’s actually happening with the artists who make it. There will always be a handful of musicians making new rock music, just as there will always be a handful of musicians making new mariachi music. The entire debate is semantic: Something that’s only metaphorically alive can never be literally dead.
