Nah, the original Mac had all that too. You'd select multiple files by shift-clicking. Command-option-escape would force-quit an app. Numerous corruption & crashing issues would be fixed by holding down Command-option-P-R on startup. MacOS 8 gave us Ctrl-clicking to pop open popup menus. Option-click would often do a number of strange app-specific things.

I suspect it's more that you're becoming a power user. Power users have always had a lot more functionality available at their fingertips, in exchange for investing time learning a platform really well. It's just market segmentation: you don't have room to put all the functionality that everyone might need on screen, so you put the stuff that most people need all the time on screen, get them hooked, and hide other stuff in an obscure reference manual so it can spread through tips & tricks blogs.