Have the EGR system parts been updated with better design?

There's nothing conventional about that wisdom, it just appears in a lot of posts around here. It's a result of conflating two different things:

• The main effect of EGR (its purpose, even) is to make the cylinder charge take longer to burn. The fuel/air charge in the cylinder is going to give off a certain amount of heat energy when it burns, and by spreading that burn over more of the power stroke, the ball of burning gas reaches a lower peak instantaneous temperature inside the cylinder before being pooted out into the exhaust. Take away the EGR and that same amount of chemical energy is released faster, up near the top of the power stroke, and the ball of gas gets fleetingly hotter. It gets hot enough to make NOx emissions, which we don't want, so that was the original EGR motivation.
• Engine starts overheating? No. The temperature of the massive aluminum block, and head, and gasket and coolant, responds to the total amount of heat released in the burn, which is the same either way, and is regulated by the coolant thermostat, which takes in stride much larger variations every time you accelerate or coast or go up or down a hill.

There is a different phenomenon that can arise when expected EGR isn't present, namely 'detonation', that in fact you can find engineering literature linking to gasket damage.

Exhaust is almost completely combusted gases. There might be, despite the engineers' best efforts, some uncombusted gases there, but there is no little demon at the EGR pipe tap who can sort them out from the combusted ones. So what's getting cooled and recirculated is just plain exhaust—almost entirely stuff that cannot be burned again. That's why it's used: by inserting molecules of stuff that can't burn in between the fuel and air molecules in the intake charge, the fuel/air ratio is kept the same, neither richer nor leaner, but the space between those molecules has been increased, so they take longer to find each other and there is a slower, steadier burn.

Again, it's not a matter of overheating per se. If there is a causal link between EGR clogging and gasket failure (as some but not all here are convinced), it may be through a different mechanism such as detonation.

When the car can detect impaired EGR flow, it takes protective measures like retarding the ignition timing to lower the risk of detonation. It uses a single manifold absolute pressure sensor to gauge overall EGR flow. One thing that can happen, though, is the four small passages in the intake manifold become differently clogged, and then some cylinders get more EGR than others, without the single MAP sensor revealing any problem with overall flow. In those cases, there isn't any protective ignition timing change, and there may be more of a detonation risk.

I think the reasoning goes ring problem ⟹ more oil burned ⟹ sootier exhaust ⟹ faster clogging of EGR.