It's a difficult one to answer and there isn't really a right or wrong answer, more a case of explaining how things have evolved in that period.

Over the past 10-20 years there has been a huge rise in data and analytics. Clubs have invested heavily in analysis to enable them pinpoint the supposed 'optimal play' in various situations, exactly where each player needs to be when they / the opposition have the ball in a particular area of the pitch and drill it in to players through coaching and repetition.

10-20 years ago that didn't happen, and while it was certainly far from 'go out and do what you want', there was more of an emphasis on utilising individual skill and talent and hard work than tactical instruction.

Also, Pep Guardiola became Barcelona manager in 2008 and built on the philosophies of past coaches like Johan Cruyff to drill the idea of 'positional play', essentially turning the game into more of a chess match where every pass and every movement is deliberately made with the purpose of drawing the opposition into certain areas of the pitch and opening up space to progress the ball up the pitch. Whereas the more older school mentality was more like 'our right back and right winger need to work together to get the better of their left back and left winger, our centre backs try to get the better of rhetorical strikers, our strikers try to get the better of their centre backs and if we win as many individual battles as possible we have a better chance of winning'. Pep took over Man City in 2016 and many managers down to lower league level have tried to emulate that.

So going back to the original question - there is far less of an emphasis of individual talents and more of an emphasis on tactics and teamwork. Players like Ronaldinho, Scholes and Beckham would still be brilliant today - though the first thing Pep did at Barcelona was sell Ronaldinho as he didn't work hard enough and had too much of a party lifestyle - but the real flair players who had bags of talent but didn't work hard wouldn't be tolerated. Teams are more tactical now and there's an argument that some modern teams would beat older teams through superior tactical knowledge and coaching. But there's an equally strong argument that they'd struggle to cope with the individual brilliance of those players and that the game is less exciting as a result.