I used to program with 6 thick reference books around me. Has memorizing SDKs, APIs, libraries ever been a thing? Or is this just the daily "everything is bad nowadays" post?
Today on day one i would go: wtf is this Babel thing and how do i configure it so that Angular work together with SASS and is npm compatible with this version of Typescript? Which reactor pattern is flavor of the month and what stupid parameter was needed to make the router work? I hardly even know which files are shipped to the browser anymore after all Webpack preprocessing.
But once you actually have the setup in place, i have to admit the modern experience is a lot more productive and powerful. It's just that every time you have to start a new project or touch anything related to the build-process your soul dies inside. There are too much gunk just built on top and on top of each other, instead of replacing the whole stack, and thanks to leaky abstractions you have to understand at least something throughout every layer of the rotten cake.
There are a lot of scaffolding-scripts available, like Vue-cli, helping you to do all of this but imo they just add even more to the problem, now you got yet another layer of crap to crawl through and it prevents you from actually learning the real layer underneath.
Today with node/angular, I'm generally leaning on Google (well DDG) pretty heavily throughout the day. Web platforms seem substantially more complicated today than they used to be. Then again, maybe the mid-aughts was the golden age of programming.
The number of times I google how to do the thing I'm supposed to do is relatively low, but the number of times I have to google how to fix something that has come up AFTER I did the thing I was doing is probably 90+% of my googling.
They basically said "errr, you could just look it up?" - like, it was obvious that the interview was more about what you knew, and how to do things, rather than can you remember every little thing from ever about your job that you don't use day in day out.