How Was the Work of a Recording Engineer Changed?

For my generation, we recording engineers were maestros of capturing reality. Multi-million dollar rooms were constructed for sound isolation or acoustic enhancement. You're manipulating the signal flow from the microphone to ultimately the loudspeaker in order to give the listener the most realistic impression you possibly can. So this new technology rendered the art of painting practically irrelevant. And yet that is offering opportunities for those music visualizers who really prefer to not see the real world when they listen to music.