It’s not that modern devs have forgotten techniques so much as they now spend their time on techniques that operate at much higher levels of abstraction. Every

It’s not that modern devs have forgotten techniques so much as they now spend their time on techniques that operate at much higher levels of abstraction. Every abstraction layer is designed to be multi-purpose, meaning not optimized for a single purpose. As these layers accumulate, opportunities for optimization are lost. A 90s game like Rollercoaster Tycoon was coded in assembly language on bare metal and limited OS services. A modern game might have game logic coded in Lua, within a game engine framework coded in C++, which calls a graphics API like OpenGL, which all runs in an OS that does a lot more. These modern layers are still clever and efficient and optimized using tricks as far as they can be, and the increased resource requirements come mostly from the demand for higher resolutions, higher polygon counts, and more graphical special effects.