Oh, in that case, sure there have been some changes. The reason I didn’t mention them is the first post asked about “sharpening images,” so I think we assumed that meant the Detail panel. If you’re asking about the tool strip, then the Crop, Spot Removal, and Red Eye tools actually have not changed much over the years, and don’t affect sharpening anyway.
However, local adjustments have undergone a major change. For many years, the gradient, radial, and adjustment brush tools were the last three on that strip. But recently — and this is definitely something that trips up a lot of new learners — local adjustments were completely redesigned, with new capabilities, under what is now the Masking tool, the new fourth tool on that strip.
What used to be three tools (gradient, radial, and adjustment brush) with refinements such as range masks, are now eight tools that can be combined in ways that were not possible before:
Select Subject and Select Sky – machine learning automatically identifies the subject or sky of the photo, and creates a mask.
Brush, Linear Gradient, and Radial Gradient — the current versions of the traditional local adjustment tools.
Color Range, Luminance Range, and Depth Range — the range masks, which can now be applied on their own. In the past, they could be applied only as modifications to other mask types.
The way to get current info is to check the Lightroom Classic version used in the tutorial. To describe the changes above, it must cover Lightroom Classic 11 or later.
It is definitely true that there are years and years of tutorials that are not going to go away, describing how it worked from Lightroom (Classic) 1 through 10. Some of those still have good information you can use; just keep in mind that the three tools they cover are now sub-tools of Masking. They also will not go into the important new ways to combine masks in Lightroom Classic 11 and later, such as Add, Subtract, and Intersect.
For current information, Victoria’s books are consistently useful because she is very reliable about keeping them up to date.