The big lie is just that the community changed.
As a vanilla raider I don't see a big difference between vanilla raiding and todays progression raiding. Vanilla was a bit more hardcore since many people did know what it takes for progression raiding and 4+ raiddays a week were accepted as a "casual" thing. Today its more like 2 raiddays tops.
The big lie is that people tell you they did play vanilla as a progression raider. There is never proof they played, there is never proof that they can compare it to todays game from their own experience.