It's a lot harder though, because you can only target a single IP at a time and many switches have preventative measures built in. Back in the day the hub would conveniently send all the packets on the network to you and all you had to do was listen.
not really and not true, back in the day ettercap automated arp cache poisoning a LAN which lets you sniff more than 1 target since they map the gateway with the attackers mac address, switches might protect against this now but even in the early 2000's it was very effective (not that I would ever do it)