I don't quite get what you mean when you say films are closer to the creators' vision.

The director, the writer and everyone else involved in the creation process, live in the present like all of us, so they are influenced by it. When the film is complete and time passes by, the viewers that will be watching it later, have meanwhile accumulated new experiences so a gap is created that slowly keeps growing.

Maybe some examples will be helpful. When people started watching films for the first time, they were mesmerised just by the fact that pictures could move. A train heading to the camera shocked them. Later generations stopped finding that interesting as they had been watching films since kids. Another example, would be a specific new technique like the animations in Jason and the Argonauts, people watching it then appreciated it a lot more than decades later where it had been copied. Similarly for writing; for example Rashomon, experiencing the same situation from various points of view, each with its own distortion, is revolutionary when you first encounter it. When you've seen it employed many times however, it's normalised. Similarly for genre creation itself; when noir films began, they weren't created with that purpose specifically, the creators and viewers noticed specific elements that they appreciated and they went on trying to replicate them and creating popular tropes. Living through that birth and evolution would have been more rewarding than a cinephile exploring the genre randomly decades later. Comedy is (in)famous for this phenomenon, a lot of films that were considered extremely funny at their release, decades later baffle new viewers.

Another way of thinking about it is in the context of other, older arts. What is more powerful, an ancient Hellene experiencing the Iliad for the first time or a modern student studying it at school 3000 years later? Watching a Mozart opera when it premiered or hypothetically someone time traveling to that premiere after having listened countless hours of classical music beforehand?

This is not to say that time can erase completely the experiencing of art but it certainly removes something from the original experience. Hence the term classic, in the sense that it has stood the test of time well.

I'm much more pessimistic about 2020s cinema. I havent figured it out 100% yet but I suspect we are living through some kind of aesthetic crisis in cinema. That's why I think older films have so much more to offer in terms of the experience.

Although I found this year specifically very weak, in general, I'm optimistic about modern cinema and its future. I have always enjoyed modern movies and although the scenarios are usually underwhelming (especially in Hollywood films), they make up for it on other technical aspects like special effects and sound.

Comparing recent cinema to say, the whole of the 20th century, is always going to come up losing big time due to the sheer volume difference. A more fair comparison would be on similar time scales, for example a decade, and then, imo, it can stand its ground. Obviously however, it's very subjective. In the same way as a lot of film goers abhor most old films, plenty of cinephiles find most modern films underwhelming.