I'm not sure if there was ever a Golden Age when young people knew the histories of their honoured elders.... but I agree it's a different world these days. It's easy to get irritated with the ignorance of thee young, but what are they doing, except adapting to the world the oldies have created?
Many of us on here will have made our living from a specific expertise, exercised lifelong, in a world where knowledge paid. Today, the young are seeing you have to travel light, expect to see your job disappear at any moment, junk what you already learnt and be prepared to learn whatever knew stuff your employer wants. Knowing stuff, even knowing how to do stuff, has lost a lot of its value.
What's the reward these days for accumulating "just in case" knowledge? Might as well just google what you need, when or if you need it. A few decades ago, a few publications had massive angling readership and we all watched the same few tv channels. Not surprising that we shared more knowledge, whether that was who **** Walker was or who Morecombe and Wise were. Today you could watch niche youtube videos, blogs, fb etc for years and never suspect match fishing exists. Our whole way of life is reducing what we have in common, apart from being stressed, angry and confused.
Those big names people have mentioned seem to have been of a different calibre, though, and I don't think it's just nostalgia to say so. The match angling greats refined the basics - floatfishing, reading a swim, feeding and so on - to a level most of us aspire to but will never reach. Some current fashions though, seem to be less open-ended and less inspiring. Just a personal example: the commercial scene by-passed me, but every now and then I give something from that world a try. I've read up on, say, method feedering on youtube on Monday, bought the bits and pieces on Tuesday, caught a bunch of carp on it on Wednesday, then put the stuff away for weeks or months. It works, but........ But I never get fed up of trying to get bits of peacock or balsa to do what I'd like them to, even though they often won't.