I think you see cleverness in coding still, certainly in the distributed space I'll find insanely clever stuff on occasion, but I mostly agree that the "optimizing for every single bit of memory and shifting between five different palates to spoof monochrome animation" days are mostly over. I think this is largely a good thing, as it makes programming more accessible to people who don't have the ability to figure out every bit of minutia involved with a CPU (particularly since modern CPUs are ridiculously complicated!), but I will admit that occasionally I do love seeing old-school tricks to stretch out memory and make systems do things that they have no right to be doing.

My favorite "wtf how is this possible" classic game will probably always be the SNES port of DOOM. It's definitely among the worst ways of playing DOOM now, but for a port to the SNES, even with the SuperFX chip assisting it, it really does not feel like that should have been possible.