Post #84 by tarheelhockey was absolutely correct and I encourage everyone to read it now, if you haven't.
It's not a simple "yes" or "no" answer, and anyone claiming that it is has a dismissible opinion.
First of all, the NHL in, say, 1980, and the NHL in 1999 are almost two decades apart and are completely different. Those periods are probably far more different than comparing the NHL in 1998 and today. Further, even the early 1980s and late 1980s are very different. I've heard several other people say -- and I tend to agree -- that the NHL improved and changed more, and more quickly, during the 1980s than at any other time before or since. For me, the average team in 1981 and the average NHL team in 1989 are very, very different. The game changed an enormous amount in this period. The early-80s still resembles the early-70s, not long after the first expansion, but watching top teams from the late-80s is very similar to watching hockey of today, just with two-line offsides, more holding, and less shot blocking.
Good players born in the early or mid-1950s (stars of the mid/late-1970s) tended to have foreshortened careers -- even shorter careers than players of the 40s, 50s, 60s. Why? Because the game changed so much in the early/mid-1980s that players who were already established found it hard to keep up. It's amazing how many players who were still stars in about 1980-81 were "dinosaur-ed" by the NHL of the mid-to-late-1980s. As examples: Guy Lafleur [though his first retirement was premature], Bill Barber, Craig Ramsay, Mike Rogers, Mario Tremblay, Thomas Gradin, Daryl Sutter, Danny Gare. These were all All-Star or semi-elite players at one point, but by their early-30s, in the mid-1980s, they were all washed up.
However, players born in about 1960 to 1965 tended to have MUCH longer careers that stretched well into the 1990s and beyond. You've got the 1979-80 rookies like Bourque and Messier, who played to 2001 and 2004 respectively. You've got Yzerman coming in in 1983 and lasting until 2006. Sakic from 1988 to 2008. Jagr from 1990 to 2017. Chelios (who is only one year younger than Gretzky) played to 2010.
This same longevity was witnessed sometimes from players in the 1950s to 1970s (Howe, Plante, Delvecchio, Mikita), but it was not witnessed by players who peaked in the 1970s. They were dinosaur-ed quickly during the 1980s. All of this is to say that the game began changing rapidly during the 1980s, and that the early 1980s is a completely different game from the late-1980s.
I would say the NHL had a certain "quality control", stability, and consistency from around 1986-87 through 1995-96. For me, I think roughly 1989 to 1996 is the peak of the NHL's entertainment value and also its star power. Since many of the 1980s' players were still superstars well into the 1990s, and because so many young players (incl. more Europeans) were also emerging superstars, it was a very "superstar" heavy period with an unusual concentration of elite talents that just hasn't existed since. I think, by the mid-1990s, the NHL was just the right size (expanding from 21 to 24 teams), and, in terms of entertainment value, had just the right mix of speed, toughness, offense, defence, rivalries, etc.
From 1996-97 or so onward (as Mario Lemieux, Brett Hull, and others pointed out), the NHL was becoming too scrappy, too rough, too dirty, with far too much obstruction and semi-legal play being permitted. In my opinion, at the same time this was happening, the NHL began over-expanding, with the result that today there are too many teams to ideally frame the available top talent.
The League sorted out the dirty-play problem during the 2004-05 lockout (by calling a lot of penalties), players eventually adjusted, and today we have the new, super-clean NHL.
But do we have the talent levels of the late-80s to mid-90s? It's hard to say. Obviously, in a short-shift, systems-rule style of hockey, it is harder for elite talents to stand out from the herd, so it's not just a case of looking at scoring domination. To me, it's more a question of: How many teams today have individual players I'd pay money to watch? Or: how many teams play entertaining-enough hockey that I'd enjoy watching them even if I don't cheer for them?
As others have pointed out in this thread, the demographic of families producing NHL players has changed drastically from the pre-1990s period to now. Current and future NHL-ers will, by and large, be products of upper-middle class, educated, urban families... which is fine, but since the bulk of people (and therefore the bulk of talent) are working class and won't be able to afford hockey, we are sure to miss out on many, many elite talents who simply won't play hockey because it's too expensive. (There is a current 1st-overall draft pick, playing in the NHL, who had to skip an entire year of hockey when he was young because his parents couldn't afford it.) This is to say nothing of the foreign-born population in countries like Canada ever increasing, and fewer and fewer young people (proportionately) playing hockey in Canada.
I'd generally agree that today's bottom-end players are more consistently skilled, and certainly skate consistently better, than comparable players in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, though how much of that is up to equipment changes I'm not sure. The NHL of today is closer to the NHL of 1986-87 (the first version I remember well from childhood) than any other version of the League I've seen since the mid-1990s (though with lots of differences, obviously).
Numerous examples from the history of the sport prove conclusively, as far as I'm concerned, that elite players are elite players in any era (let's pause to remember that Jagr aged 43 was doing better at even strength than prime Crosby in 2016-17). The clear changes in the game over the years have little or nothing to do with talent levels, but have a lot to do with the size of the League and the changes in equipment.
(Also, some of you need to give up this "everyone smoked during games in the 1980s" silliness. Believe it or not, there were regular fitness routines in the 1980s, hard training, goalie coaches, etc., etc. There's a reason Chris Chelios lasted until 2010.)