It's worse from a competitive and from a fan's perspective, but it's obviously more reasonable.
This old style of refing you describe, merely checking if someone's still alive and conscious is a guarantee for higher rates of CTE.
It's also plainly not what intelligent defense actually means, there was essentially a disconnect between written rules and their interpretation, where refs just replaced the key phrase in the rules by something entirely different, namely "intelligent defense" with "any defense whatsoever".
