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There is something else going on here. In addition to the manufactured diamond price and availability, younger people in the US are not going for diamonds for engagement rings, or anything else for that matter. Like with the antique market that has plunged dramatically due to the change in attitude toward cheap furniture discarded at the time they move, there simply isn’t the same demand for quality as there was in the past.

Poetic karma.
Kill the family, muddy w/biological mutilation/abortion & you’ve successfully killed your market.

There is an angle not being discussed here, crime. Crime and/or money laundering have used diamonds for decades. Security protocols have made transporting things of this nature much more difficult in the wake of 9/11. Putting diamonds in water once beat the security protocols, but now TSA (as one example) have made that a bit more cumbersome. I should imagine, cryptos are a new favorite, or GOLD with upwards trend have become desirable. Cryptos, are likely the easiest to smuggle across boarders and through security. A wallet can be stored on a flash drive as payment for one thing or another. Some bud’s of mine in the know are seeing trends in bad guys using simple yet sophisticated “hybrid” systems of smuggling (think Templar’s back in the day). A given $ amount of cryptos can be transferred to an offline wallet and exchanged for the currency of choice (+fee) once they hit the desired location. Simple and HARD to track.