If I hear one more person talk about people who "sacrificed" their lives for "our" "freedom" or "way of life"

I may be lucky, but I don't think I have heard anyone talking about that - most commentators have been explaining that the war was important because it shaped the world we live in now, with all the consequences you mention.

And of course there's a layer of sentimentality over the commemorations, but that's because it's only just slipping out of living memory; because of the scale of the casualties many people know of someone in their family who died, and it's modern enough for that to be reinforced by the preservation of photos, letters etc, so they remember it as their great-uncle's war (for instance), and they remember the great-uncle as an individual they might have met if he hadn't been killed. The scars are still visible in a way that those of the Napoleonic wars aren't.