I think a difference is perhaps that the time investment required to adapt to the old automation was a lot less than that required to adapt to this one, while human lifespan hasn't categorically changed (the most dramatic shifts in life expectancy in the last century and a half have come in large part from infant mortality improvements). Working in a factory in the Industrial Revolution didn't require much training/education at all. Post-WWII, the shift in job-skills to essentially requiring literacy was dealth with by a society that tried to ensure that its citizens were educated enough, with great results.
This time, starting around the 70s and 80s, we entirely failed to educate our populace to the point where the majority can be fully-productive members of the new job marketplace. It's becoming conventional wisdom that having only a high school degree (as a crude heuristic for skill level) is not enough to be productive economically, and this is becoming increasingly true of having a college degree where you don't learn anything useful. In every cycle of improved tools/higher skill bar, there are casualties that weren't able to improve their productivity fast enough; this is one of the uncommon cases where (in the US, at least), "people not keeping up" is a systemic issue instead of a transient one (I don't think the overall education system today is all that much better than 20 years ago).
It's a "this-time-is-different" situation in a limited sense; that is, it's not inherent to the nature of the automation-cycle itself, but rather to the nature of our response to it.
Note that this isn't some engineering-centric notion of needing immediately applicable skills from college. Studying something more academic in college has just as much value, as long as it's something that's useful (a good rule of thumb is "as long as you use the things you learned in college in the future"). I'm referring to the fact that it's long been the practice for many people to get a college degree in literally anything with the knowledge that the existence of the degree itself would be a good enough signal for intelligence/skills that you could get an okay job afterwards. This is increasingly untrue.