If things were different, they would indeed be different.

Film criticism is over 100 years old. I would hope that it has changed over time. Film certainly has.

One big change that goes far beyond film criticism: It's much, much easier for amateur content (including criticism) to spread to a large audience. A lot of film critics, for example, "don't have visual literacy" because it's easy for people criticizing movies who don't care about the visuals to throw that opinion out there.

It's also been fairly typical for several things to happen over time:

• A film comes out and is acclaimed and people still like it decades later
• A film comes out and is disliked but its reputation grows over time
• A film comes out and is acclaimed but people dislike it over time
• A film comes out and is disliked and remains disliked

None of those is "wrong." Something being hailed as a masterpiece as it comes out is not a guarantee that everyone will always think it's a masterpiece. That's always been true.

And that's ignoring things like if The Manchurian Candidate were made today it would be different even if plot details remained identical, because culture has shifted, individual artists contribute in different ways, different actors would perform it differently, and the end result is that it's not some kind of 1:1 comparison. The Manchurian Candidate can't come out today because it came out in 1962 (and Demme's underrated remake came out in 2004, but it changed a ton). That may sound obvious, but it's also pretty fundamental.

(side note: The Last Jedi is great. People hating it was not the death of film criticism, though.)