I think it's odd that your response to a pretty specific complaint is that the game has become better overall, rather than speaking to the particular issue. My guess is that nothing has changed there.
It may be true that they have made improvements to tomenet, but this is not saying much. There was an alternate version of the game when I was playing that did simple things like making basic items more available in shops so that shop scumming was a less central aspect of the game and that already represented a significant improvement. Similar very simple things, such as removing food, fuel, curses and identification, along with the massive volume of useless items generated to prop up the identification minigame would also massively improve the game. Identification in tomenet is shockingly tedious and bizarre, completely disrupting any kind of flow to the game.
Tomenet, even ten years ago, had correctly nerfed a lot of the worst angband mechanics, such as teleport other, teleport level, *destruction* among others, which in all my history of tomenet criticism I never gave them proper credit for. But the fact is they keep plenty of the worst stuff, in particular instantaneous teleportation, monster summoning, high damage breath weapons, and 31 flavors of elemental damage, and compound them by putting these instantaneous effects into a real time setting. It is such a simple-minded transcription of turn-based mechanics into real time it's mind boggling anyone can take it seriously enough to play.
