This is romanticising the past.

The modal person just trying to get their job done wasn't a software artisan; they were cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow, using textbook code verbatim, and using free and open-source code in ways that would likely violate the letter and spirit of the license.

If you were using technology or concepts that weren't either foundational or ossified, you found yourself doing development through blog posts. Now, you can at least have a stochastic parrot that has read the entire code and documentation and can talk to it.