Yes, this. And even worse, "I recognize that 'bleeding edge tech' as yet another rehash of something innovated in the 60s or 70s and therefore I'm not nearly as impressed as you by it."
It does matter if you're aware of the cost:benefit ratio involved in adopting it relative to the existing tech, or even more commonly, the cost:benefit ratio involved in adopting it relative to adapting or modifying existing tech. Maybe as an employee, it might not be the right thing to be pushing with an employer enamored of the new tech, but as an objective onlooker, it very well may be.
There's plenty of amazing innovation happening all the time, so I don't want to come across as a luddite or whatever, but hype does happen, and as you get older, you witness more of it and become more skeptical of it. You see the fads come and go--the faster they come, the faster they go--and the survivor bias. The problem is that it's there, and it feels sometimes like you face the choice of correctly pointing that out, or being labeled a cynic.
Sure, experience matters and some technologies get over-hyped. I was referring to the more specific case of dismissing a technology solely because it is a rehash or has failed in the past. For example, dismissing Docker because of LXC or FreeBSD jails. Or dismissing Node.js because it uses cooperative multitasking. Or dismissing SaaS because the "thin client model was tried and failed" (yes, just a decade ago, SaaS was considered over-hyped).
That's because people that say that usually are cynical. And usually right too.
"I've seen people try that 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 years ago. Nobody made it work." Is rarely something that does not matter, and people that can't answer the implicit "why would you succeed?" question usually doesn't.
Good, because my cynicism was hard-won, pity should it go to waste.
Whether or not a piece of tech is a rehash does matter, because last time we decided RDBMSs are old, in with the new open schema whatever, I learned where the sharp edges were at. There has been no magic tech in the mean time that makes MongoDB less likely to cut you up in horrible ways. As just one example.
It doesn't add much value to the conversation and whether some tech is really a rehash or not rarely matters. It also makes you sound cynical.