What would the modern day's equivalent of Florence be?
Location still matters for many reasons, infrastructure, safety, public health, climate, and industry-specific agglomeration effects being among them.
Even with the internet we see that artistic and scientific output is uneven across the world. There are places where ideas thrive more than in others. For example, if you contribute to the research frontier in physics, chemistry, or computer science, you are very likely to be located in one of the few centers of thinking in your field.