Similarly, search engines used to give more weight to domains that were aged because search engines assumed that since the domains had been around longer, the domains were probably more established with better content than a domain registered yesterday. That increased the demand and value for aged domains for a while. Today, search engines may still do this to a negligible degree, but it's not worth considering for SEO purposes anymore.
Search engines give the most weight to user interaction with the page. This trend has started 10+ years ago. Now its weight reached to over 80% in my opinion. Because its importance has been well tested especially after search engines became able to track visitors accurately.
Other SEO factors are now less powerful. EMD lost its power long before, more recently backlink factor followed the unfortunate end of EMD factor (including natural and powerful baclinks). I always defend search engines can never detect if a backlink is natural or not. It seems finally search engines accepted this fact and decided to remove backlinks factor from the table. Which factor left that's tied merely to domain itself except its age? Nothing. Only age factor remained untouched.
In the reality SEO value of a domain lost. As backinks and EMD lost their power almost entirely (if you aren't a search engine staff it's difficult to know exact weight of every factor as this knowledge is kept very private to prevent manipulation of search results), age benefit became less noticeable along with total SEO power of a domain.
Your opinion is not completely wrong, is rather incomplete. Age factor has never been very powerful, but has been always been bigger than zero. If you buy a domain for better SE rankings, you must still buy an aged one. You just don't need to pay more for its backlinks or the words in it, including its extension for SEO. Or, maybe you must never buy a domain merely for SEO.
Lastly, if a domain is still in search index, bad history shouldn't affect its SEO unless you reinstate the domain with the content in its old bad days. However if an aged domain has bad or negative words in itself, this can affect SEO negatively but not for its bad history.