I would argue that this perception is still prevalent, in a sort of anecdotal 'I see it on history forums' sense. Within academic circles, though: The Historikerstreit was pretty much the defining debate of the West German academic & public discourse of the 1980s. This dispute between right-wing historians like Ernst Nolte & Andreas Hillgruber, and their opponents like Jurgen Habermas, centered on whether or not Nazism represented a special category of evil as compared to the bad deeds of other governments, and whether or not its legacy should play a defining role in modern German society. The legacy of the Wehrmacht, including questions like "Was my Opa a war criminal?", was of course a very important aspect of this debate. Given the positions advanced by Nolte et alia on this matter, such as the claim that the Wehrmacht and even the SS ought to be memorialized the same as Allied soldiers for their 'honorable defense against Asiatic Bolshevism*,' I think it is reasonable to say that the Clean Wehrmacht myth was alive and well even in the 1980s, although not a majority opinion.

Further, I know that in some American circles it was very in vogue up through the 1980s. American military circles, in particular, were and arguably still are infatuated with the "Wehrmacht mystique" as a result of the US military's attempts to draw tactical lessons from the Nazi war against the USSR. This lesson-seeking effort involved some very uncritical interviews with Wehrmacht commanders, who of course insisted that any war crimes were exclusively the fault of the SS, or were committed by unnamed "neighboring units." The emergence of popular English translations of Nazi memoirs, starting in the relatively early postwar period with books like Manstein's Lost Victories (1958 for the English translation) and then surging into a proper cottage industry in the 1980s with schlock like Panzer Aces^(†), only exacerbated this trend in American popular consciousness. The American view tended/tends to focus more on the so-called honorable defense against communism and the alleged military prowess of the Wehrmacht, rather than the right-wing German perspective which also focuses on national identity and the claimed right to national memory.

*Viz. the 1984 Bitburg Cemetery memorial controversy.

† Incidentally, this 1980s cottage industry basically started with one man. J.J. Fedorowicz is a Canadian publisher who got his start in his garage, importing mail-order copies of memoirs like Paul Hausser's Waffen-SS im Einsatz. Despite the optimistic wishes of the historical community, his business is still doing quite well, and has grown to actually facilitate the writing of entirely new works of historical negationism.