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There are several main factors that made animation in contemporary anime look less lively than classic anime. They are mostly caused by changes in the production process, budget issues and the changing taste in animation.
Many have pointed out that CGI is the main culprit, but did not mention the lines itself. In traditional 2D animation, every single frame is hand drawn and scanned or even filmed on a camera rig. Even with the most proficient artist who can draw the cleanest lines, the compiling and editing process will inadvertently create imperfections in lining up the frames.
The imperfections created by the drawing hand combined with the compiling process will create an effect which we animators call "wriggling lines". It is this wriggling line effect that makes the frames look lively even when the characters are in a static pose.
Nowadays with CGI taking over the anime industry for more efficient production, artists no longer translate their line work into the final product and digital images have much lesser imperfections, making the frames look less lively.
At the same time, studios are always assigning budgets to the most important scenes, emotional climaxes or huge action scenes, they have left the other more frequent dialogue and filler scenes animation poor.
The stiffness of digital lines combined with the lack of animation in majority of low key scenes makes anime look sterile in comparison to classic animation. You can notice this in many slice of life anime where the frames are made to save budget by cutting straight to characters sitting in position and half the characters in frame are not even facing the camera so that they can save budget by not even animating their mouths open or closing. Sometimes they do more budget tricks like looping animations, chibi scenes, chibi looping animation or even worse, a panning shot across a still frame.
Like what the TC has pointed out, animations today no longer have 'transitions', this is the result of budget saving and also the preferred cinematography of the modern age, quick cuts that go straight to the point. The audience nowadays crave changes on the scene, they no longer want to stare at the same background where characters walk into the scene and perform simple actions that are actually animation intensive.
Also importantly, the modern audience no longer have the wonder and fascination of pure animation technique and artistry that people had back in the golden ages of animation. The modern audience have taken animation for granted as this has become something extremely common and not some kind of film magic. This is especially the case for the general anime audience, they are either more interested in the seiyuu speaking or insane action scenes to care about the skill put into animating a character sitting down and doing mundane stuff.
Animators are actually actors and they act with their pencils, expressing themselves on paper. Every action is acted out by the animator physically or mentally first before being put in frame. Simple everyday actions can be as challenging to act out as dynamic action scenes, but this is no longer the concern of the modern audience.
I've always thought that it is unfair that animators don't win film awards like film actors do, and when animated films win, they only win a single award to represent entire crews of hundreds of artists. Good animators are as good as real actors and probably put in more effort into the frame, having to construct every single detail from nothing.
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