I remember reading the Land race weed thread a while back, that was a HUGE read for a CD thread, very informative and entertaining.
Anyway, OP, you can still find high quality golden colored buds, but most often (at least in the US market), I've found the low quality stuff to be the brown or amber colored bud. High quality is usually red hairs, golden tinge, and light or dark green and well trimmed. Low quality (shwag, mids, reg, etc) tends to be of all colors. In between we get KB, better than mids worse than headies, which I find tends to carry a particular odor and color, generally a redder hue, though this isn't always true.
It depends on the grower and the location primarily, though a lot of the good bud we get now is indoors, so that is representative of the color. Realistically, though, the red and brown bud is going to be the bricked or low to mid grade range cannabis now a days (generally, of course. There are so many strains that could go against this, as well as changing temps to change colors while flowering).