X is a stand-out work of genius, head and shoulders above everything else it was contemporary with, at the time it was made. It was the confluence of strong artistic vision, technical excellence and innovation, and near-flawless execution, where all the parts managed to come together cohesively without any thematic friction - which rarely happens in any project. The reason X is better than 99% of stuff made today is because it was better than 99% of stuff made then, too.
Someone probably will make something as good as X this decade, but expecting most things to be as good as X is absurd. Remember Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap.
Examples: pop-punk in early to late 00s, photorealism in paintings in 1900s, “boomer shooter” videogames of late 90s/early 00s, etc. I don’t see photorealism in paintings having a massive comeback or a nostalgia wave right now, but pop-punk and “boomer shooter” videogames have been having pretty strong nostalgia waves recently, and they are doing quite ok.
And I 100% agree with your overall point, people remember titans like the original DOOM/Quake, but forget the flow of all the lazy unimaginative derivative slop that eventually started proportionally dominating those niches (which is what eventually spelled out the end of the mainstream hype era for those, and let us enter the “they dont make things like that anymore” fallacy stage).
AFAIK with the proliferation of photography the people who used to do life-like painting of other people lost a lot of business and it seized being a profession.