FiM won´t be put as the best series nor cartoon of the decade. My knowledge is way too limited and I realize that I haven´t consumed almost any other TV show from this decade for drawing comparisons. However, I can safely say this without any fear:

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/the-end-of-the-creator-driven-era-29614.html
When Amid Amidi wrote this article, it sparked the explosion of interest towards this show, looking for the laughs in its atrocity. However, we have found something else. While it´s true that Lauren Faust abandoned the project in 2011, the show managed to accomplish a very different thing. Nowadays, the article should have been named:

The end of the cheaply written toy commercials era in TV animation

Eeeeyup, Friendship is Magic won´t be remembered as the best cartoon or series of this decade because of its eclectic highly stigmatized spirit. Nonetheless, it has ruined the previous generations of MLP because of its quality that is bound to become more timeless than the rest because there was more effort put into this generation and that shows. Only by telling that it went from 65 episodes to more than 200, a spinoff, a movie and its entrance in the comic world, you can notice easily how well adjusted it was.

Not only it has ruined its own toy commercial spirit, having to justify its quality in order to sell merchandise to children, it has has ALSO RUINED (yes, ruined) any other toy commercial that can air in the future on the TV.

As soon as any series has the purpose to aim at little children only for selling toys to them in order to get away with its poor quality of writing and substance found its animation, any critic could come and point at Friendship is Magic as a reference for judging toy commercials.This means that the public will ask for quality as soon as anything cheap of this kind appears in the future. Those cheap animations cannot afford to apply that tactic and justifying the possible atrocities that could taken advantage of. Friendship is Magic has turned out to be an example of how far a toy commercial can get, how successful and relevant can become if one doesn´t aim so low all the time, getting something to say and explore out of its comfort zone.

The 4th gen has received praise because it has surprised everyone out there, so it cannot be written in the history of animation (if it does) as a laughable product. It managed to establish a world and its characters, expand itself and beyond over the course of the seasons, mature and looking at its own past, and close the book before overstaying its welcome. Again, this is worthy of my admiration.