When i started out tinkering with tech in general in the early 2000s people drawn to the internet were still mostly a smaller core of passionate forerunners many of whom subscribed to artistic values like simplicity, beauty and the idea of zen. This began to change with web 2.0 circa 2008.
Both my Mac and my Pc from 2005 are way snappier than todays OSX or Win10. Not as fast but has way less latency.
Today tech education is aimed at highly paid and fancy careers for lots of kids with little passion for engineering or designing who never learned to use a desktop because they just had an iPad - they hardly know that you can copy and paste and almost don't know what a website is outside of walled gardens, i kid you not.
This year had had the most students ever start in tech related fields, and i know from teaching shortly at university that about 95% have not gone into the field because they love to tinker but because it's highly paid or a "cool career".
I know there are still the oldschool "designers and experimenters" out there but it's all about signal to noise. Of course size, complexity, high level modularized abstraction and dependency hell is also an issue, but this probably won't get resolved as 99% of tech people today don't care and don't remember using a computer that didn't have 500ms of latency when closing a window.