I think the difference now is that traditional software ultimately comes down to a long series of if/then statements (also the old AI's like Wolfram), whereas the new AI (mainly LLM's) have a fundamentally different approach.
If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.
The whole point of algorithmic AI was that it was deterministic and - if the algorithm was correct - reliable.
I don't think anyone expected that soft/statistical linguistic/dimensional reasoning would be used as a substitute for hard logic.
It has its uses, but it's still a poor fit for many problems.
We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.