I am a little over 50 and I have also seen the same pattern play out. It's incredible.

Lots of things were the Hot New Things That Will Change Everything, like VLIW processors, transputers before that, no doubt others. Perceptrons! Oh wait they can't do XOR functions, well how about Neural Networks? Too complex! Tell you what then, Fuzzy Logic, it'll power everything from washing machines to self-driving cars! Now we're at LLMs that are just neural network-powered Eliza bots that pirate everything like you did the week you first discovered Torrentleech.

Some things have stuck around, like OOP and RISC processors. Others like Quantum Computing are - like Iran's nuclear weapons program - just weeks away from blowing away everything we know, for the past 40 years or so.

Everything runs on relational databases on thumping great Unix boxes and that's unlikely to ever change.