Are you cherry picking the good games out of older libraries? I find people do that a lot when remembering. It’s a survivorship bias thing. The good ones get remembered more and the bad one forgotten, so they seem like the population is better.

People that have this opinion often only play AAA games. There are a lot of indie games that channel old-school game energy and improve upon them. Shovel Knight for example is a lot better than old platformers wish they were. A Hat in Time is a ton of fun compared to the vast majority of PS2/Gamecube 3D platformers. Hollow Knight is better than any Metroid game (I know a lot of people would disagree, though).