The good old times? When exactly?
Vanilla only, when most specs were pretty bad?
For the longest time, you had a very strong gear lock-in to your spec with almost all your gear being spec-specific due to class sets being spec-specific. And of course for classes with different roles, also everything else due to mainstat differences.
Then there was a brief time where gear got better, and only weapons and trinkets were left, although if you wanted "BiS" you of course still collected multiple sets due to secondary stats being different per spec.
Of course after that it got a bit worse again, although with BiS requiring a different set before already, really not that much. Legion was probably one of the worse times since weapons were leveled independently.
In short, if you cared about "BiS", you practically always had to do twice the work to play two specs. If you didn't care about BiS and just wore the same gear always, surely covenants won't be any different now.