I was around 25 years ago pushing bits around SunOS boxes and when people were still figuring out CMSes. FTP and BBEdit ftw. Definitely some things were simpler, but stuff would fall over in a heartbeat. I still think of the day of 9/11 when major websites couldn't serve their homepages because they were bombarded by traffic.

Kids in their rooms still do write the next big things. The difference now is they now raise a ton of money along with it. They scale a whole lot further, and much faster. There are more entering the engineering profession through Lambda School and bootcamps and what not. They also leave around a lot of shitty code that usually ends up building some business value. Much of this was true back in the day. It's just gained a whole lot more momentum IMHO.