Man, it's gotta have 3 or more large eggs, a pound of block or hoop (not Velveeta) cheese, grated + some to go on top, and real butter. If it's not golden brown with crispy edges, it's not done. Even better if it has shrimp, crab, or lobster in it.

It is generally true, due to a bunch of factors. Personally, I've observed 2 factors:

1. a lot of culinary tradition was lost by the boomers and their parents due to the advent of mass-produced, packaged food and the Great Depression. A lot of very basic, holistic techniques like making broth, rendering fat, became less common as magazine recipes, refrigeration, and boxed food encouraged discrete "buy x y z for recipe A" instead of having an assortment of preserved veggies/meats, broth, lard from previous days etc, to work with and learn from. I was genuinely confused to find my dad had to teach himself a lot of it in his 20s and my mom never learned.

2. Economic/cultural history. A lot of families didn't see making food better as worth sparing any effort or time on. My grandma's boiled veggies and potatoes, no seasoning, and meat fried in a pan, no sesoning, eaten and cleaned up as quickly as possible come to mind.

Seasoning = salt.

Almost every aspect of this video is so annoying but I refer to it all the time

American white people.

https://macattackcle.com/blogs/mac-chat/the-black-history-of-mac-and-cheese