Piter, I think the problem is that modern bottle caps are much less substantial than the older ones. Also, older bottles were commonly designed to be reused, not recycled.
So now we have bottle lips that aren't strong enough to take the force of popping off a cap without bending it (as with an opener).
Another variation of this I used to do was opening bottles on the edge of a table. You just hold the cap on the table's edge with the bottle at an angle, and smack it with an open hand. This also has a way of ending poorly now.
What really scares me is that sometimes the bottle's lip stays mostly intact, but tiny shards of glass flake off.