You sound just like a baby boomer complaining about how all music is bad these days. There's no new pattern here: good design, like good music, is remembered while bad design is forgotten. There were repetitive design patterns and lazy emulation ten and twenty years ago, just like there are now, but we don't talk about them much.

I personally coded way more table based drop shadows, tickers, and splash screens than I wanted to. Those ideas then, just as now, came from lazy product managers, small budgets, and general mediocrity.