Your point more or less comes up alot in discussions around Lord of the Rings compared to modern fantasy novels. There are a lot of people who, while the appreciate what it did for the genre, find the novels dated and feel like they have seen the ideas too many times and/or done better elsewhere.

Though on the flip side, I personally find sometimes it just takes a few hours to “see past the age”. For example, I was introduced to Fallout by 3. The show made me want to try the originals, and after a few hours of struggling through the ui and dated graphics, it started to “click”. Now the original only competes with NV in my list of favorite Fallout games. Had a friend who had basically the same experience with the original KOTOR.