I think this is partly because things have gotten vastly more complex & abstract, and none of that complexity and abstraction has been managed well. We basical

I think this is partly because things have gotten vastly more complex & abstract, and none of that complexity and abstraction has been managed well. We basically always say "Yes right away" to increased complexity/abstraction these days when PM wants something. Tech debt was lower back then.. maybe all of our practices were worse, but the code bases were thousands of times smaller which made up for a lot. Heck Agile hadn't been invented yet back then. You got requirements and got to design the core technology first. There was no such thing as an MVP hack and all of a sudden you had a back end that had millions of lines of code and 10 layers of abstraction that was all built on a bad design.