You can even have encounters that are too dangerous and should be avoided, though 4E players are pretty tough.
Of course, my experience is, PCs always act like they are tough, no matter what edition.
The difference, of course, is that if players act like they're tough with first level PCs, they die. Period. Slash. Roll a new character.
Risks in a dungeon are managed differently with each edition. The basic, gross assumption is that the greater the risks (and thus greater the probabilities of terminal failure for bad play), the older the edition of the game.
We could be speaking of lethality, resource management, whether talking of equipment, spells, food, henchmen and hirelings wounded or lost... risk-taking was a greater part of the game in earlier days, and was multi-dimensional in nature. It wasn't just about game mechanics, not just about whether you had just spent your Daily power or Healing surges or not.
I personally appreciate older styles of resource management and risk taking precisely because of the different approaches offered in actual play, because smart play is rewarded, stupid play punished by failure and death, and the evolution of a rough character concept into a fully fledged out persona means that you've done something right in actual play, not that you came up with a cool concept prior to the game.
Further, some of these types of resource management, namely things like light sources, food, hirelings and henchmen, help me better immerse myself in the game world. They are about the character connecting, interacting with, and managing his adventuring environment, and not the numbers on the character sheet.
So yes, I firmly believe that something has been lost in this regard as editions of the game came out, one after the other. Now it's about the tactical management of the "now", with broader management being incidental, a detail compared to encounter management, at best. It's about playing super-heroes fighting villains and their henchmen, with the possibility of some kryptonite coming into play somehow, somewhere. Not about adventurers trying to make it through a world that is literally and actively threatening to them.
There's nothing wrong with this later feel if you and your buddies happen to like it. I just personally like it a lot less than what the game once was, and still is, to me at least.