It was already difficult to maintain before these tools went mainstream. I’ve worked with many a senior developer who couldn’t write a hash function, didn’t understand memory allocation, and could go on all day about best practices and lint rules. They could make things that, “work,” but couldn’t tell you why.

And that was fine! It was a pain. But people need to learn. If you had experienced people around who did know those things then everyone would learn and improve. Most of the time.

Also, we were limited in how much code, and therefore how much slop, we could produce.

Now everyone has a firehose aimed at production. It’s hard to keep up.