It's a hard question to answer...
I tend to know a little about everything but force myself to be an expert in my professional work.
Some people arround me are experts in their field but borring since they are not familiar at all with other fields.
In the past people could be experts in a lot of subjects i.e. Da Vinci because human knowledge was narrow, today it is impossible !
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That's interesting. Is it really the past that allowed being expert in many fields because it was narrow? Why aren't there more Da Vinci's now? Someone could learn the same things, regardless of there being more things to potentially go into. I think some people like him were just unique, or they chose the right fields to syncretize together ;)
Rethinking the less amount of knowledge is part of the answer for having less polymath people in our 21 century.
Maybe the other things are the high demand for monomath persons due to the modern economy and labour market that require experts for specific area.
Could be that Da Vinci also Galileo, Aristotle or Bertrand Russell are a result of their living times.
Maybe the conditions of the modern time are less suitable to encourage growth of geniuses.