I think that's a fair criticism for music where there is so much of it that the filtering of time makes a real difference to our perception of past music.

But cinema is a smaller world. Yes, there are plenty of independent films, but most audience attention has always been focused on the small number of tentpole films. And if you look at just those over time, everything the author says here still holds up.

Watch some of the top ten box office grossing films from 30, 20, 10 years ago, and today. The change in style, tone, and quality is enormous.

Pick any random comedy or drama from the 80s or 90s and it will have more realness, more sense of being there than movies made today for 10x the budget. This being despite the fact that the older films were shot literally on film and the grain is visible.

Digital color, an obsession with CGI, and a fixation on storytelling that plays well across an internation audience (which means violence, action, physical comedy, and simplistic morality tales) has made today's movies a shadow of what they used to be.