Why Are Villains All Sympathetic Now?

Have you noticed the trend in the last couple of decades of stories that make the villain into a sympathetic character? Yeah, we already had the antihero, which is a hero that goes against type, or has character flaws you wouldn't expect, but this is different. In the TV series Breaking Bad, we watched the main character go from a sympathetic everyman to a full villain, but we rooted for him anyway, because everyone else was even worse. Disney has given us sympathetic backstories that make us feel sorry for Maleficent and Cruella DeVil. Even Godzilla went from stomping on Tokyo to protecting it from other monsters. And then there's Wicked.   

Maybe it's because we are so fascinated by the evil character. Arnold Schwarzeneggar played the most captivating role in The Terminator, so they brought him back as a good guy in the sequel. Darth Vader got a redemption arc in the end, and it was repeated with Kylo Ren. But this trend of seeing the story from the villain's point of view is not really new, it just got submerged in the first hundred years of cinema. PBS takes us back to the roots of our sympathy for the devil, literally and literarily. But is the modern version of this trend an attempt to understand bad behavior or to excuse it?