I think you're looking back with rose tinted glasses. Making returns in previous eras was very difficult. It was very much caveat emptor or make an enormous fuss.
I agree. I remember 20 years ago when returns were much more of a hassle.
For example, at Home Depot in the 1990s, to return something, you had to fill out a written form with a pen. The cumbersome pen & paper dance was repeated by the cashier as she had to analyze the receipt and manually circle which items were being returned. Today, their POS system just scans the UPC bar codes and immediately puts the refund amount back on the credit card. Literally 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes.
Also, if I lost my receipt, the cashier justs ask for the card number I used. They can then find the transaction in their database and issue a refund back to the card. Container Store can also do this so I assume many retailers can do it. This convenience is all made possible by modern POS systems. Previously, the stores had a strict "no return without a receipt" policy.
Overall, returns are easier today, not harder.
On average, absolutely.
In the long tail, maintaining a system that bypasses software blocks is rare, and perhaps prohibitively costly. Yet the need for overrides exists.
I had budding criminal friends in high school who were no doubt partially responsible for why it became so difficult, because they were exploiting the easy returns for personal gain.
They would buy 56K USRobotics modems from Best Buy and return the boxes containing used 14K modems. Someone had found a large quantity of disused USR 14K modems, I think it was from an office building dumpster. Weekends were spent doing this across dozens of stores at scale, I never heard about any of them getting caught.
Back then your average retail employee wouldn't know a modem from a sound card. All they verified was that a circuit board computer thing was in the box.
I think to some extent that was why the early Internet felt free. Not because it was necessarily that free, but because people of different views could agree on technology as something empowering. Like from the famous hackers manifesto:
"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me..."
Today it feels like technology doesn't like me. The decisions were made by someone else "because that is just how technology work". While they are usually making a lot of money.