So in the end, it is more about attitude, not talent.
The bulk of the work, in my experience, is simpler than the programming part. It's just a culture/priority thing. Like how most of the industry used to not use source control. Now we do, we didn't need to add "talent" to get that done either.
Those computers were an order of magnitude slower. Yet many equivalent apps today run at about the same speed.
Performance is not being prioritized. And I suppose back then, devs had no choice given the resource constraints they had.
I've seen many times devs paying for larger databases instance without first even taking a few hours to try and optimize their queries.
...is a scotsman that doesn't exist.