I've had the same experience, but only with embedded developers like you described. It probably has more to do with how talent is distributed age-wise in that field.
They came out of that era without being spaghetti-coders like a couple of the guys that were, basically, ousted before I got to that office. So they learned to code well within constrained (cycles, memory) environments. As more cycles and memory became available, they just used it more effectively.