Interesting. I don't necessarily like the "neo" term but agree with the sentiment. The Western genre, in many respects, literally died. And that has to be taken into account when writing in and about the genre:

"Leonard’s novel was written just at the end of what we now remember as the golden age of the Western genre, at a time when the author himself had already migrated to more fresh and vibrant varieties of potboiler. Since then, time has passed, John Wayne has died, and the image of a ranch-dwelling man on horseback has been requisitioned by a series of decreasingly plausible American presidents. Yet the Western itself has never quite gone extinct. It lives on in the form of the neo-Western, the backward-looking descendant of the original species, distinguished above all by its self-awareness as a genre out of time. That is to say, the neo-Western knows that the Western is a dead genre, and it knows that we know it, too. And so it must somehow attempt to answer (implicitly or explicitly, through serious reflection or through mocking parody) the question of how this came to be."