Everyone seems to be assuming there are less steals now even though career longevity is a big part of a career leaderboard.  So I double checked.  Average steals per game for whole team in 2018-19 was 7.61.  In 1996-97 it was 8.19.

So, there are indeed 0.58 steals per game less today.

Chris Paul gets less than 1/4th of his team's steals.  Assuming he got 1/4th of 0.58 steals more over his 950 game career he'd have 0.58*0.25*950 = 138 more steals.  Adding that to his total he's at 2,260 moving him from 10th to 8th place. 

However, the difference in steals hasn't always been as large as 0.58 over his 14 year career, so giving him 138 more is being more than generous.  Also, he only played 2 years of college ball.  The rest of the leaderboard was older when they started in the NBA.  In his first 2 years he had 286 steals, which more than makes up for there being less steals per game overall in today's game.

Although the game is different, that's not the reason the guys on the leaderboard are there.  They really were good at getting steals over a long career.

(I got stats from https://stats.nba.com/teams/traditional/?sort=STL&dir=-1&Season=2018-19&SeasonType=Regular%20Season.  The oldest season they had was 1996-97)