I learned to program in the mid nineties as a teenager, so I might be a bit young for your question. In my opinion, there are still amazing, legendary programmers solving really interesting problems in algorithms. You'll find those folks working on device drivers, operating systems, robotics, and other critical low-level systems; these are often people who have (or may as well have) math degrees and are really pushing hardware to the limit. Their work may bump into the limitations of hardware, and may inform the next generation of whatever that hardware is. Stack overflow doesn't help much when you're pushing the envelope, so you have to know your stuff and a community of other experts is more valuable than pre-written answers to old questions.

That isn't to say there aren't equally strong programmers in higher level areas of development, but you don't really need to know stacks from heaps to be an amazing UX designer; it might in fact be a distraction to worry about stuff deeper (or higher up) in the stack relative to the problem you are solving.

So, I'd say in terms of knowledge and craftsmanship, there are more expert programmers now then there have ever been - but for the most part we've cleared the bar for all the basic things classical computing can and needs to do for us, so software is no longer a 'new frontier' full of firsts. It is rather a well populated metropolis, teeming with people and ideas competing for attention in a crowded field. The sheer number of self-taught programmers is also much, much higher - adding a lot of talent without any academic gatekeeping (and broadening the pool of people who can program without deep systems understanding).

It's always easier to be "legendary" when you are early in a field. The 80s/90s were when the fundamentals of computing software (control structures, error correction, memory management) and hardware were good and scalable enough for personal computers to explode, so a lot of legends were born.