I just rewatched both Bladerunner movies with my son and, the first movie, while aesthetically it still looks beautiful and has some great individual scenes, the action and the dialogue get kind of non-sensical at times, it’s become the weaker of the two movies for me. 2049 feels just a lot more coherent and looks brilliant, it’s just an overall better movie that surpasses the original.

Blade Runner was very much a product of its time (though Syd Mead’s visuals were outstanding).

There was something floating in the late seventies / early eighties zeitgeist that would become the cyberpunk genre, and it sort of condensed in several spots simultaneously.

William Gibson had just published Burning Chrome, and was finishing writing Neuromancer (which would be published in '84 and be considered a foundation of the genre).

Ridley Scott and Syd Mead independently adapted a (very different from the film) book by Philip K. Dick into a film that looked and felt like it was set in Gibson’s Sprawl.

In Japan, Kasuhiro Otomo had just begun publishing Akira.

Frank Miller was probably in the process of writing and conceptualising Rōnin, which DC would start publishing in '83.

Bruce Bethke had come up with the term cyberpunk in 1980, but that short story wouldn’t be published until '83.

Over the next few years many other authors would create other works clearly set in the same genre, though at this point they probably had some influence from Gibson and Blade Runner and each other.

Mike Pondsmith was drinking it all up and coming up with a role playing game with that title, to be published in '88.

And, all over the eighties and nineties, the genre exploded, and was everywhere.