I think the difference is that our goals with startups has changed. Money has always been important, but other things matter too. They still do, but I believe money has weighting that money has to the equation has significantly increased.
I think Apple is a good example. There's plenty of critiques to Jobs (neither saint nor villain, but man) but he at least understood something: functionality and aesthetics go hand in hand. It always sucked to pay a premium for Apple hardware (and I even long protested it, fearing we'd get what we now have). But at least the hardware was higher quality (I'm aware of arm, that's not what I'm talking about), the aesthetics were great, in both the physical machine and the software. But now, what is the innovation? Smaller? Thinner?
I feel like Pantheon captured this very well when they have Pope saying he doesn't know what he's doing so he's really just trying to get Steve back to tell him what to do. I feel like this has happened all over Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world). The metrics became the targets. The hacker mentality of make products that make a better world and get rich while doing it are not as valued, even if it was always a facade. We still had deep respect and revered the hackers that rejected the money. The reason to learn to program was not to get rich, but to control computers. And whatever that meant to you, is true (even with silly bitter "vim vs emacs" rivalries. But even that illustrates a difference of today). The days people wrote the hacker manifesto, the deep ties to anti-authority, the liberation that the net could provide, all that and more. Now, I see two very different classes of students when I teach. There are the kids who love computers. Sometimes they skip class, sometimes they come in for a sense of duty, but when you provide an environment to let them be free they will give you the best projects even if they fail the tests. But most students just want an A and a good paying job.
I could never blame anyone for that! Life sucks, and we all gotta live. But the passion is different. Less finding problems to solve and more finding problems that allows them to use a specific tool (whatever is most popular at the time: currently ML). I don't blame anyone, but yeah, it is different. These things still exist, and probably even in higher quantities than ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it is not true for percentage. It's like we won, but forgot why we did all this in the first place.