VFX artist here, heres what happened: Clients continually change the brief, shot design and planning are no longer a priority, and we have a lot more work to get through in a shorter amount of time. We have and can create work better than back in the day, it just needs the right leadership team, planning, and time to make sure it happens. The average film changes a lot more during postproduction now than they used to. This means new work gets added to our plate and work we’ve already started (and sometimes even finished) gets scrapped. The “fix it in post” mentality also doesn’t help. As with everything VFX related, it’s almost always the studio/leadership team who is responsible for when things don’t get done up to scratch and never the actual artists fault.