Matte paintings can be touched but they are flat, two dimensional objects that are designed to trick you into thinking they have depth, same as digital ones, so the fact that they physically exist is more of a technicality, and it becomes especially meaningless when the end result is that they are get photographed and turned into film, the same as everything else. The best old-fashioned matte paintings were very good, but 95% of the time they still look like matte paintings, and most typical examples are obviously not the cream of the crop and they really look like matte paintings. The foreground objects were composited optically too, and they always stood out, whereas digital comping has no edges and no mattes lines. I think theprequelsrule is romanticizing this a bit much.

The only difference between then and now is that they are used more often because they are cheaper to make digitally. In the old days you could afford five matte shots, today you could do eight. They usually looked fake back then, and today they still usually do.