To me, "the good old" days were back when I was a kid first getting and playing the NES. SMB1 & 2... Mostly 2. Mario Kart 64, and the voices that came with it, was somewhat OK since the subject matter of the game was a bit different but IMHO they took it waaaay too far adding them to the classic platformers.
At the very least they should have provided an option to turn them off.
All that said, I kind of skipped the 3D part of the 32/64-bit era while it was happening. I stuck by my TG-16 and other 16-bit consoles to get me through it. For me that was a turn for the worse in the video game industry. Probably the only modern game I actually played in those days was Mario Kart 64, believe it or not. I never bought any of the consoles from that era until well into the "128-bit" (DC/GC/PS2) era. I still refuse to touch a Playstation, and I don't own many games for my Nintendo 64.
I associate a lot of crappiness in video games from that period. For me, adding voices (a spawn of the video game "dark age") to the classic SMB platformers was like pollution of a beautiful thing.
It wouldn't have been as bad if, as I mentioned, you could turn them off. Or at the very least, only have them occur and the end of a level or something.