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The biggest differences are
1. Editing. Almost every modern, major commercial recording has been bar-beat edited, so every riff and every drum hit sits perfectly on the midi-map.
2. Real stereo. In the good-old, bad-old days, we had 24 tracks to play with. 48-track meant sync'ing up two macvhines and was a tedious business, so one avoided it if possible. With just 24 tracks, the luxury of tracking every guitar in stereo was just not possible without some hassle. Today, just about every commercial studio has 48-tracks of AD-DA and the larger ones much more. Virtual track counts are more or less unlimited, so just chucking down multiple tracks for everything is no big deal.
Real stereo makes everything sound louder and far 'bigger.'
3. Budgets. Although the small jobs are getting even smaller, the budgets for major commercial releases are getting larger. In part this is driven by the costs for major US-wide releases spiraling out of control (payola costs - aka radio agency costs - for example run into millions). So throwing top talent at a project is now the norm. In the past, some band would spend a few weeks in the studio and that would be that. It was mixed and sent to the lab for white lables.
Now, a drum-doctor comes with a truck-load of stuff and spends two days, or even more, just getting 'that' sound. Then, after the recording has been done, a platoon of session musicians are brought in to fill in all the parts where that the band members are not 110%.
The project is then sent to a top editor and then to a top mix engineer. Several versions are produced and focus groups are brought in to comment on the various songs. Jut the focus group process can take several months.
Reverb dead? News to me! We may not go for the OTT Phil Spector reverb useage, but it gets used ever time, from what I can see.
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