Interesting topic. I would say that, for the genres that existed in the past,
no, with some caveats. The following is just my guess, as I haven't done any
real research on this topic, and I don't truly know the state of music production circa early 2000s.
A few things could have happened between the past (let's say, before the early 2000s) and today that caused significant declines in perceived creativity. The proliferation of DAWs + Internet communities allowed amateur producers to start creating electronic music without expensive hardware. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the 80s and 90s, electronic music was largely created by musicians and, essentially, audio engineers who had the access to the limited expensive hardware of the day: Roland TB-303 for acid, Roland JP-8000 for those saws, and so on. There weren't many sample packs available, so producers had to synthesize their music and samples largely from scratch, possibly programming it in real time (such as
Acid Eiffel from 1993). Chances are, these owners were also the few people who had access to the hardware manuals, so only they would have known how to use the hardware to synthesize the sounds they wanted. Their focus wasn't necessarily to create massive pop hits, though some of them sold a lot of records. Some simply wanted to make a name for themselves in the underground electronic music scene, which was
just about to turn mainstream in 2000. (Massive mainstream hits like Children were rare.) Others, like Tiesto, were more like architects who deferred to the
real music producers who actually knew how to use the hardware.
While DAWs proliferated, and the Internet allowed music production communities* to form, producers also started creating and selling sample packs. That would make sense - if you're talented enough to create
good samples from scratch, wouldn't it make sense to earn your money that way instead of hoping for a hit?
Then, as music production became more accessible, less talented producers started releasing generic/derivative electronic music. Ultimately, producers just wanted to create hits with the general public to earn $$$, which came at the expense of originality and creativity. Why spend so much time creating kicks and saws from scratch when you can just load up some samples from a cheap sample pack?
The more removed the producers were from the fundamentals of music synthesis, the more generic electronic music as a genre became.
....
Then, there is also the fact that we tend to have a rosy view of the past. There is a lot,
a lot of bad electronic music from back then that no one remembers today. Yes, there are the classics - Gouryella, or Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, or Acid Eiffel, but there are also many releases that time forgot because they just weren't interesting or creative enough compared to the rest. And this is true for music in general - you can take a random week where The Beatles released a song, and I'm sure you can look up a bunch of songs released that same week that no one cares about today.
* I'm thinking of tranceaddict, trancenu, dogs on acid, and possibly even the SectionZ community where deadmau5's earlier work as halcyon441 was hosted