Yes, Ronaldo was that good.
But it's also for a few other reasons.
Players these days have limited exposure to "street" football, it's all textbook stuff. And textbook says: shoot the ball. As it says: pass the ball. So you don't see this happening as often.
There are places in the world now that are reverting to some hybrid kind and teach kids to play in 2vs2 or 3vs3 situations at a very young age to force them to be able to go past their defender. And get them to become better defenders. We lost both traits in the graduation classes of the last 15 years because the focus has been elsewhere. And when everyone does the same thing everywhere, there's bound to be someone who's better at it. Hence why Spain, Germany, Portugal and France for example had better prospects coming out of their countries whereas you struggle to see Argentina, Brazil (who still have a "street" element but it was rapidly declining) or even Italy and the Netherlands who also struggled with this sort of football globalization.
So to answer your word simply, it takes guts for these kids to try to go past the keeper in this day and age because that means that they did all they had to do at the academy level, but also ignored their coaches' commands of doing it "the right way", whatever that is. The worst of it all is from England, they've always been about "shoot it" whenever you were clear at goal.
Strikers still get 1 on 1 opportunities, probably even more than before per striker as a general rule across the sport. But there's less strikers on the field. Game has gone much wider than the Ronaldo era. It was also wide in the 70s and 80s, but a different sort of wide and they still had more attacking players in the box.
I expect that we'll see this becoming a trend again - unless stopped by some new defensive setup - over the next 15 years.
10 years of FIF
