The scale is massively different though. When you make a page today 95% of it works on all browsers. Back in the IE6 days that wasn't even remotely true, which is why things like jQuery came into existence, not to mention the insane CSS hacks required. IE calculated padding differently to every other browser, requiring you to rewrite any code that used it. There's no equivalent to that today.
Today isn't a dreamland, but it is in no way as bad as the IE6 days.
But that's not the IE6 days. That was when other browsers were already well established and IE6 was that zombie feeding off corporations never upgrading that you just couldn't kill.
But in the early 2000s, you only ever targeted IE6 and maybe 5. Opera was that weird European thing, Netscape disappeared by 2003 and Firefox was that silly open source stuff used by people without friends or any sort of social skills. That was the IE days.
Today isn't a dreamland, but it is in no way as bad as the IE6 days.