Maybe some of the consolidation is due to the increasing importance of supply-chain at the expense of location in low-margin businesses.
If capital is unavailable intentionally by central control of the economy, the talent has a negative value (mismanagement destroyed the company, perhaps) and the resources are regulated away except for grandfather clause'd incumbents, then this good idea doesn't happen.
If it did happen, it would be good, but I believe it no longer happens.
-JM Keynes
We already have a zombie economy. Well-connected people can fail in bad faith, break the law, and nothing bad ever happens to them. A few seats may be exchanged, but it's the same set of (mostly, inept and morally bankrupt) people in charge.
Has anything been learned from the fiasco of 2008? Not really. We've added some regulations, but we still have the same people running the corporate economy and, while they may be short-sighted and greedy, they're not stupid and will find ways around this set of regulations just as they did the last ones.
Now, on the matter of small businesses: the question of whether "creative destruction" is good comes down to, "why did those businesses fail?" If a restaurant fails because it's badly run and produces a low-quality product, that's a good thing. If it fails because the local economy has gone to shit, that's a bad thing. I think that most of the change is an increasing rate of the latter.
On the macro scale, I don't think the proportion of businesses that "deserve" to fail has increased. If anything, it's lower because it's harder (outside of the Valley) to start one.
That said, the real problem isn't that businesses are failing. That's inevitable. It's that new ones aren't being created (because no one has the capital).