One need only hear Taxman and Opinion back-to-back to hearing his Beatles love
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I have VERY strong feelings on this. 
First, you’re right.
Second, you could argue about the type of solo, sure… but saying Cobain killed the guitar solo doesn’t really add up, considering how many Nirvana songs DO have guitar solos. He was alternately either very melodic (Teen Spirit, Heart-Shaped Box) or atonal (Breed, Serve The Servants, though that one at times is kind of both), but they were often there.
Third… The downside of the shred movement is while it sounded awesome and made being a lead guitarist cool as hell… it wasn’t accessible. If you were just picking the guitar up, Steve Vai might as well have been on a different planet. I mean, bad example, actually, since he probably is… but then you pop Nevermind into your record player, and as someone who’d never tyouched a guitar before, that sounded like something YOU could do. That was certainly the case for me, growing up on a diet of Jimi and the Stones, where I always loved the sound of a guitar but it wasn’t until someone played me Unplugged in New York that suddenly I felt like maybe this was something I could do.
And, of course, some of those kids fumbling through “Plateau” in their bedrooms then grew up and heard a Satriani record and thought, "hey, that sounds awesome, it might be fun to be able to do that.
Countless kids all over the world picked up a guitar because of Kurt Cobain. Even if only 0.5% of those millions of new guitarists decided they liked guitar solos… that’s a lot of would-be shredders.
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Me, I am one of those kids that got a guitar for Nirvana songs…
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Same here. Unplugged. That “Plateau” example was not exactly made up. 
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I did the opposite. As a forever rebel, I rejected anything that didn’t have a crazy solo after grunge and Nu Metal producers decided solos were not so cool, just to go against the trend. LOL
Important disclaimer: some grunge songs have some of the coolest rock solos ever recorded, imho.
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For me, Cobain was why I picked up the guitar in the first place, but when I heard Jimi’s “Voodoo Child (slight return)” for the first time it blew my mind and that was my gateway into blues, lead guitar in general, and eventually to Joe Satriani. But those early grunge albums, the love never went away.
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My Dad had a few CDs and records by Eric Clapton and Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Thin Lizzy, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, etc. I used to listen to them a lot, and that’s what made me pick up the guitar in the first place.
Actually, the chord progressions in Layla are pretty cool.
I bought Nevermind when I was about 12 or 13, which wasn’t long after I started playing guitar. It’s not the reason I started playing, but I learned a lot of Nirvana songs when I was starting out.
Now that I think of it, this was probably the earliest thing I heard where I thought that guitars were fucking awesome (written and performed by Joe Perry)
Though it may have been this…
B.B. King playing Albert King. Gotta love it.
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