A specter is haunting the United States of America—the specter of communism! All powers of the Land of the Free have united to exorcize this specter: Biden and Trump, Bezos and Gates, reformist politicians and “freedom caucus” rabble, liberal professors and reactionary pundits. Yet where is the party in opposition to give the working-class vanguard a clear lead?
I'd have to partially speculate. They usually stay pretty small, have high turnover, and recruit from college students, so that's the young people churn part regardless of the exact cause.
I can note some personal observations.
Putting people at risk for no reason leading to people getting fired or arrested for doing what the org asks them to do. Pointlessly in both cases and due entirely to not really trying to plan actions appropriately. Certain aspects of organizing seem to be deemphasized, deliberately.
Internal infighting in the context of weird versions of Demcent. This leads to the meme of splitting but it also comes in the form of people just leaving and looking for a different org and an explanation for why the one they were in sucked. Sometimes those folks leave Trotskyism behind entirely and become very critical of it, instead trying out DemSoc/Maoist/ML thinking. Some still align with Trotskyism but join a non-Trotskyist org to take a break.
A lot is probably explained by recruiting from students and just not being very organized. Retention requires slotting people into projects so they can develop leadership skills. Students often leave town in a couple years. Put the two together and you've got a challenge.
I think some of the orgs have such ridiculous takes and ridiculous focuses that people eventually just question why they're in it. This is a key part of the awkward Demcent stuff. Folks that are sick of X thing will come together, form a small reform committee within the larger org, and try to push through a reform agenda. Political maneuvering will often alienate that reform group to the point that they leave, both because they now believe the thing they wanted to reform is extremely important but will never happen and because they've lost faith in those particular Demcent structures. This kind of thing happens in every communist party but I think it's particularly acute in a hypercritical tendency. We're all probably familiar with the isolated and anemic Western leftist habit that holds that having the right ideas and disavowing anything with problems is the main focus of being a socialist (as opposed to doing revolutionary work lol). That isn't exclusive to Trots at all, but it is common among their orgs.
I'm sure there's more to it than that but that's my initial take.
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