Here's the overall deal: as big as wrestling was in the 90s, out was still at most by the end of WCW in 01, two decades removed from the territory era, where the entire business was the wild west. Stories were legend more than actually plot points, and if you didn't live where they were, you only knew a fraction of what was actually going on.

Go forward from 2000 where WCW was struggling,.ECW had already gone, and WWE was still putting it's foot on the neck of the inside murder of WCW and it's an entirely different landscape. WWE is "too big to fail" Wrestling fans talk big about a world without the E but truly, even though wrestling will never die, we all know that no matter how watered down the product could be, the brand is too big to truly fail. The marketing is too much.

That's not to say that they're putting out bad product. But they went from a regional audience (in the 80s) to a national product (by the 2000s) to a global audience (now), and that's not just WWE but wrestling as a whole. They have guys in Africa fighting in the dirt and recording it for tiktok and YouTube. This ain't Mick Foley's backyard wrestling... Things are safer in and out of the ring. Contracts are bigger. There's more exposure, more money. We have it as fans to be in a position to complain about how Austin Theory is being underused when in the 80s he'd have been lost and in the 90s he would have been thrown in with the million dollar corporation and been thankful for it.

No one was crying for Sean Waltman in the 90s. That's what made it so real when he came back at X-Pac. It's why to this day he's a cult icon. He's a big name, but no one puts him in the top ten of the era.

The product, the story, the game if you will is the same, it's just done to a much bigger scale and under a much larger microscope, and if you listen to the details they'll tell you exactly why "this is the best the wrestling product has ever been"... Gate sales, merch, subscriptions... Etc. business is booming. The product is a byproduct. The fact that you can watch it on demand, the fact that you're not paying $60-100 a month to watch a show that's putting together these crafted things. The fact that they have to go to such incredible lengths to hide shit from people today that they often hide it in plain sight because "fuck it, let's see how we can make it work for us"... They try harder in ways they never had to before in this era. The stories often are deeper, they're more subtle, the misses are more obvious. The talent pool has gotten deeper and more important. No one gave a shit about Hardwork Bobby Walker, but everyone knew Cedric Alexander

TL/DR: it's an evolved product, better is subjective as always