Purely in terms of image quality, we are indeed seeing better photography than 10 years ago (controlling for sensor size).
I also think comments about "the camera [...] doing the work for you" or about sharp lenses not necessarily leading to fun or interesting pictures sort of misses the point. If you're a terrible piano player, you're going to be just as bad on a $100K Steinway grand as you are on a used $5K upright. But there are difficult and beautiful things you can do on the Steinway that are impossible, or least much more difficult, on the upright. Example: any piece requiring rapid soft passages, which is facilitated by the double escapement mechanism on the grand. There are amazing YouTube videos of pros playing virtuoso works on beaten-up street pianos, but I don't think any of them would deny their job would be easier on a well-maintained grand.
The same is true for photography.
Also, let's face up to the fact that judging additional distortion to be aesthetically pleasing is just nostalgia tripping. Back in the bad old days of film, lens designers worked like dogs to minimize it. (Same with film companies and grain – it was undesirable, not retro!) I'm not saying this means your aesthetic judgement is wrong or anything like that, just ... that's clearly the mechanism behind it. Someone without that cultural baggage is probably going to prefer the more correctly proportioned photo, all else being equal.
Sorry for being a little prickly here. But new lenses really are better! They're engineering marvels.
Now – for most people, taking photos that are going to be compressed (lossy) and shared online, and viewed on laptop or cell phone screens – can you really tell the difference between an old metal Nikon and a new Z series lens? Especially after distortion and tint correction in Photoshop? I think that is a much better question, and a much better argument in favor of eBaying old lenses. But again, it's an issue of choosing the right tool for the job. For big prints, you probably want the sharper, less distorted, less tinted lens. (But who among us routinely makes big prints? Not I.)