The short answer is yes.  The two main reasons are (in my opinion),  equipment and the fact that there are many more photographers today.  Those are (in my opinion), the main reasons.

Lenses are as good today as they have ever been.  They are not really better.  In the 1980s camera lenses reached a peak, and improvements have been slow ever since.  I actually own a 1955 Nikon lens that I bought at a swap meet in the late 1980s.  The resolution and color focusing abilities still hold up today.

Digital camera bodies need to be upgraded every few years.  Megapixel sizes and better resolution and focusing abilities mean you must keep up or you will obviously fall behind.  Camera bodies in the days of film meant much less than you might think.  Auto focus, multiple (beyond manual) metering modes and fast motor drives (film transport) were all advantages but none of these things actually made a better picture.  There was one continually changing technology that you did need to keep abreast of and that was film.  Every few years a new generation of films would come out and you needed to keep up.  Of course film is a commodity that you use up as you make pictures, so moving on to a new film was easy.

The quality of processing that your film received , or the type of darkroom work that was given to prints, were of course very important “way back then”.  Still most labs were pretty even.  Software work on your digital image in the “digital darkroom” is even more important than the wet darkroom in days  of old.  Your knowledge and expertise is important but just as important is the fact that the technology of continually introduced new software programs,  changes just like camera bodies.  You have to keep up or you will once again fall behind.

The ease in which digital images are processed, is one of the main reasons why so many people are making images of nature and other subjects.  No more making two trips to the camera store or photo lab.  No more shipping your film by mail and waiting for two weeks for their return.  Processing occurs in your camera body while you are making more pictures.  Post processing adjustments take place in your own home.

Equipment and photo software today make it much easier to make pictures of the same quality as we were producing with film and old cameras.  Trust me on this. It is however just as difficult  to make great pictures as it ever was.  By that I mean that the pictures you make today with that easier to use equipment,  need to be better because the images made by others are better than they used to be.  In other words it is pretty much a wash.

The internet in general and social media sites and photography related sites specifically have also driven nature photography to a high level and created more good shooters than there used to be.  Any day of the week and any minute of any day, you can go to Flickr Photos, Facebook and many other places and view images that were made today.  Many of these are great images.   This is driving amateurs and professionals alike to create better pictures of their own.  In addition to how much we can learn from what we see on these sites, the natural competitive juices of the human animal drive us all to be better.  Those juices move us to look at things in a creative fashion, and to work a little harder.  There are and always will be those that only copy what others do but they are not among the good new photographers.

There are indeed more good nature photographers today than ever before.   That drives everyone to be even better yet and that is a good thing.