What makes "modern dev" more labor intensive than not "modern dev"?
Well it is, objectively, way broader and deeper than before the web explosion. Even aside from the web aspects - barely anyone did heavy database work back then. And if you had a reasonably firm grasp of one OO language - guess what, you were practically a "rock star" (well before the current usage of the term). You knew something about the differences between the Unix shells, and maybe something about inodes and fsck? Great, here's a "devops" (er, sysadmin) job for you.
Nowadays there's just (conservatively stated) at least an order of magnitude of basic "stuff", much of it conceptually independent from the rest, and a lot of it quickly obsolescing (almost as soon as it "matures") - that one has to have a reasonably firm grasp of, just to move the needle from A to B. Or at least not come off as "fossilized or "enterprisey", when talking to "hot" companies, these days (I've actually had the latter said to me, as a description of me, over the phone - after an interview).
So yes, objectively speaking - it's way more intense.