How is the situation today different than it was back then?
Historically people used all kinds of money, like feathers, shells, stones, and ended up with silver and gold. The reason for this is that silver and gold are the hardest to produce. Every time somebody can inflate the money supply they can extract value from everybody who uses that money. Europeans did this in many colonies for example, e.g. by manufacturing glass beads that were used as local currency.
The dollar was backed by gold in the past (Bretton Woods), but Nixon did a rugpull and refused to give other countries gold for their dollars. Since then the US keeps printing more and more dollars, now adding a trillion every three months while the first trillion took like a century.
So, the difference between then and now is that the dollar used to be strong, and now it is weak. It’s still strong enough to be the world reserve currency, but there are cracks in the system and they grow.