So video soundtracks are recorded/mixed in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish dialogue, and you are deafened by the action scenes? True. This was never a problem in 1940's movies, where everything was done on a sound stage, and most of the "atmospherics" were dubbed in later. Or sometimes the dialogue was dubbed in later to patch up rough spots. The theaters did not have bone crunching subwoofers under the seats, and moviegoers actually gave a damn about what lines the actors were speaking. The deep resonant whispers that used to fill the theaters in the heyday of the talkies required a commitment to making the dialogue audible, at the price of a pretty unrealistic effect. Recovering dialogue from location shooting on noisy streets, is like trying to get the scratches off vinyl.
I am struck by the fact that many of our "action" movies contain only a couple of thousand words of dialogue interspersed with huge amounts of audio mayhem, and that musical sound tracks are often mixed so loud relative to speech that the dialogue is unintelligible. Not so much modern craft (the old techniques are not lost in the mists of time) as modern taste.