Even back in Golden Age Hollywood, they were doing this. Proud old Hollywood tradition really.
There's a WS Gilbert (sans Sullivan) song that goes something like this:
Quixotic is his enterprise and hopeless his adventure is
Who seeks for jocularites that haven't yet been said.
The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries,
And every joke that's possible has long ago been made.
And of course that goes for everything else besides jokes. We might as well give up and make the internet read-only right now. And whose idea was the Oscar category of Best Original Screenplay?