Anything is better than today.
At some point music like many movies became mass produced, formulary, and lost creativity and uniqueness.
I think they figured out the ideal length, beat, range, have some folks write together something, and pick a pretty face to sing or dance to that...
Pre 2000, there was metal, rock, punk, new age, country, techno, frigging Celtic if that floats your boat. There was a lot of true variety and new stuff that was unique/new and today that seems missing. You had a lot of artists that were writing some pretty intense lyrics that told stories or had depth to them: Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, etc.
Today it just feels mass produced and shallow. Dumb stuff that goes boom, boom, but just talks about how you’re bad or have a big di#$.
Anything older seems better, even before my time.
Everything now is derivative.
It’s like classical music, there’s really nothing new you can do with the genre, and people just stick to listening to the classical composers, like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, etc.