Dictatorship was a different thing in old and new Rome.
“This point is often missed in teaching Roman history because Roman history is very long and so gets very compressed in a classroom environment. Even in a college course focused entirely on the history of Rome, the gap between the end of the old dictatorship and the start of the new one might just be a couple of weeks, so it is easy for students to accept the new dictators as direct continuations of the old ones, unless the instructor goes out of their way to stress the century-long discontinuity.”
https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictatorship-how-did-it-work-did-it-work/