Sure, the programming landscape was much different 30 years ago. We also didn't rely on code versioning, CI/CD, testing, and many other practices we consider st

Sure, the programming landscape was much different 30 years ago. We also didn't rely on code versioning, CI/CD, testing, and many other practices we consider standard today. The industry has since evolved to make development better and more reliable, at the expense of relative speed or simplicity. In return, we gained the ability to minimize the chances of shipping broken code that is only caught by manual testers, or, worse, actual users. Game development particularly went through radical changes. I don't have much experience here, but I can imagine the stress of needing to ship bug-free code on actual physical media, and the excruciatingly slow dev-QA-release cycle. We're spoiled these days to have automated tests, peer review, and OTA updates, where bugs can be found, fixed, and bugfixes shipped much quicker than if we were not doing this. So I agree that all of these processes add a mental and time overhead, but I wouldn't go back to working without them for anything.