Your recollection is wrong. At any point in time, it has seemed like VCs and startups were chasing the same idea of the day. The joke in early 2010s was that every startup was "Uber for dogs."
Also, to your comment "tech isn't so interesting these days"... we get a new cambrian idea or core technology every 5-10 years, and obviously AI/ML is the current one since Nov 2022.
Also, to your comment "tech isn't so interesting these days"... we get a new cambrian idea or core technology every 5-10 years, and obviously AI/ML is the current one since Nov 2022.