I still have my 90’s Technic car with multiple gears and a working stickshift. Nowadays, the sets tend to have some set-specific pieces. Back then, no individual piece was anything nonstandard.
Actually, they mostly stopped doing that a while ago. There's a new piece or two every year but it's 99.9% standard pieces with the occasional new colorization.
Dunno about this specific case, but I find that a lot of the people who say "Lego sucks now" mean "I glanced at the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and didn't see exactly what I was looking for." It's most notable with the people who insist they don't sell big buckets of generic bricks anymore, when they absolutely do. They might be on the bottom shelf under the Star Wars kits, and smaller displays at supermarkets and such might not have any, but they're still easily available if you look or go online.
