Which of the modern startup founders have gotten into the Stanford PhD program as teenagers? Those people are extremely rare and there is far too much VC floating around to focus only on such talent. Most founders, while still outstanding, are not from that class of person. Also, due to the larger sums of money being thrown around, people can just do those things now and spend their time growing their business instead of optimizing it. In the VC funded environment, optimizing businesses lose out to competitors which grow the fastest.
How else do you attract venture capitalists and convince them to throw millions at you? You need all the buzzwords and the latest tech ;)
I remember my last chat with one of such guys. They insisted that the company wasn't up-to-date because we didn't run our app inside containers and didn't develop our own AI/ML systems...