I'm 50 and got my NES in Xmas '86. It's funny how the difficulty has changed. I remember having no problem with carrier landings as a kid, beat Metroid(with the bikini ending) without reading Nintendo Power or calling the help line, figured out turtle trapping on my own...
Going back and trying to do all this via emulation is now a lot harder. I don't know if it's the timing or the fact that I'm just old and crappy now, but if I didn't have the save states of an emulator I would have given up on gaming ages ago due to frustration.
Then again I don't have the hyperfocus and 12 hour marathon gaming sessions like I did for much of my youth.
Man you just unlocked a memory. I'm about the same age...I had forgot about when we lucked our way into "turtle trapping" (didn't know until I read your post it was even called that). When the lives counter goes crazy (we called it "infinity men") we genuinely had no idea what was going on at first and thought we broke the game.
It happened when a buddy and I were completely bored messing around with the game and I remember calling my friends and explaining it but no one "got it" until we showed them.
Yeah, the number of lives counter started showing gibberish and we were like WTF. It looked like the game broke.
Also likely you don't have as much time. I'd be more keen to discover things on my own a few decades ago. Now I'm limited by work/family life to an hour of play here and there. That means if something looks annoying or long without a good reason, I'm going to look it up and not feel bad at all.