Almost everyone thinks the greatest music ever made was made in their late teens and early 20s, and it has always been that way. I think I'm somewhat unusual in that I spent a lot of time DJing in my 20s, so I developed habits around constantly searching out new music, but even so -- I'm in my early 40s now and I still reach back to dance music and rock music from the late 90s quite often to listen to. I've just resigned myself to the fact that late 90s trance music will make me happy in ways that no new music ever will.
As to the topic of the post --
In music production, you can think of the 'stage' available to the listener as a box. Pitch goes up and down, stereo pan goes left to right, and volume goes front to back. When you're producing, you can't have two sounds in the same space without them merging together in the listener's ear. In the early days of stereo music production, producers generally tried to place the sounds as if you were standing in the room, watching the band perform, and were fairly conservative with giving everything space, so that sounds wouldn't clash. As people got more sophisticated with production (think Dark Side of the Moon), producers started experimenting more with the listeners since of space -- surrounding them and enveloping them with sound -- but still generally trying to capture the sound of physical musical instruments. Even when they used synths, they tended to try and make them sound like "real instruments".
Once digital music production started becoming more widespread and sophisticated, producers started abandoning the pretense that they were faithfully recording the live performance of instruments and focused purely on sound as sound, and the new tools allowed them to perfectly place all the sounds next to each other on 'the sound stage' and take up all the available space. Which, if you're filling up all the space 'up front', as it were, necessarily means that the song is going to sound louder, if that's what people want to do.
Now, there are plenty of genres of even dance music who play with dynamics more -- think Deep House, for example -- even there, they're going to make the bass as loud as they can, because they still want to make speakers boom for the dancers -- and they can push them as loud as they can be, very precisely because ableton or whatever makes it simple to do.
Producers often use reverb for front to back space as well.
I with agree that its got more precise, typically when producing a kick for techno I make sure that the power is exactly around the point where the sub is going to be able to play it back with the most impact.
Also with tools like Neutron we can make sure there is no overlap between channels.
I am probably a similarly age to you, but I hardly ever listen to anything more than 5 years old apart from as a learning exercise or if there are people in the same room as me.
As to the topic of the post --
In music production, you can think of the 'stage' available to the listener as a box. Pitch goes up and down, stereo pan goes left to right, and volume goes front to back. When you're producing, you can't have two sounds in the same space without them merging together in the listener's ear. In the early days of stereo music production, producers generally tried to place the sounds as if you were standing in the room, watching the band perform, and were fairly conservative with giving everything space, so that sounds wouldn't clash. As people got more sophisticated with production (think Dark Side of the Moon), producers started experimenting more with the listeners since of space -- surrounding them and enveloping them with sound -- but still generally trying to capture the sound of physical musical instruments. Even when they used synths, they tended to try and make them sound like "real instruments".
Once digital music production started becoming more widespread and sophisticated, producers started abandoning the pretense that they were faithfully recording the live performance of instruments and focused purely on sound as sound, and the new tools allowed them to perfectly place all the sounds next to each other on 'the sound stage' and take up all the available space. Which, if you're filling up all the space 'up front', as it were, necessarily means that the song is going to sound louder, if that's what people want to do.
Now, there are plenty of genres of even dance music who play with dynamics more -- think Deep House, for example -- even there, they're going to make the bass as loud as they can, because they still want to make speakers boom for the dancers -- and they can push them as loud as they can be, very precisely because ableton or whatever makes it simple to do.