The new differences are:
1) Scale of the attacks. Taking large portions of a country's petro-chemical/energy pipeline is far above the threat level presented by most prior hacks. The same goes for shutting down ~20% of the nation's pork & beef food supply. And now hundreds of companies impacted as a result of a single breach. Ransomware isn't new, but it is in hockey-stick growth mode.
2) Increased market for crypto currencies. Criminal activity may not, by far, be the dominant activity, but the more legitimate transactions there are, the easier it is to hide criminal transaction.
3) Bootstrapping this type of thing takes time because it's not just about capital in this case. It's also about accumulating vulnerabilities and compromising systems long enough that backups-- for example a week or month old-- are still useless (also encrypted). And going back to earlier backups will lose the company too much essential data.
4) And as you said, avoiding media coverage that will bring too much attention, and with it the potential for a crackdown. The slow burn on increasing ransomware over the years has acclimate people to it in a way that makes even the most recent massive attacks a little more normalized, especially when they pay the ransom & get back up & running in a few days. That limits the amount of public pressure to fight this head on with mandated increased security and massive resources thrown at pro-actively going after these hackers.
5) In 2016 ransomware wasn't quite as mature. 2020 is different, and the political landscape is different: I'm not making a partisan comment here. I'm not saying the previous US administration prevented these things better or the current administration dropped the ball. What I'm saying is that when there's any new administration, there are threat actors that will test the waters, see how far they can go. I definitely thing that's a factor here, especially so close after the Biden administration delivered its list of 16 untouchable sectors to Russia & Putin. There's going to be a lot of adversarial interest in just how firm those limits are, and what the response will be.
Otherwise, from a national awareness standpoint, you do approach an important point: It may not be a new phenomena, but for the vast majority of Americans that don't follow tech news, this is new and, given the scale of recent attacks, somewhat scary.