Story connoisseurs

So I was reading this interview with a children's author.  I have read nothing he has written and can't give an opinion on the quality of his work, but his response to a question interested me.

Is good storytelling a lost art today?

I would say the opposite. We in America today are some of the most sophisticated story consumers history has ever seen. Most adults are so exposed to narrative that they’re almost a little inoculated to it. It’s very hard to impress them.

Haven't you ever had the experience of watching a movie or reading a book you loved as a child and finding it wasn't as good as you remembered it being?   Or watching an old black-and-white movie that won multiple awards and being underwhelmed, finding it treacly and obvious?  I know that The Pickwick Papers was considered so uproariously hilarious that it launched Charles Dickens' writing career, but I have tried to read that book and found it completely leaden.

Now, granted, what cultures find funny changes over time and the studio politics and the power of personality have rendered Oscar choices inexplicable on occasion.  But perhaps it's simply a measure of our culture, or we individually, simply becoming more sophisticated evaluators of story over time.  Perhaps it's not just that Hollywood is turning out more dreck than usual these days; perhaps Hollywood has always churned out bucketsful of dreck, but we're now more choosy though exposure to decades of films.  Excellent story, whether in book or movie form, is always going to be in the minority compared to the mediocre or worse.