I think this way over-romanticizes what that era actually produced and ignores the huge breakthroughs since then. So many things would not exist if participation was limited only to the kind of people that were writing software in the 80s and 90s. Many of the landmark brands of today were not thought up or written by such people.

Also, I strongly feel like old software "runs better" because neither the OS nor the software itself practically did anything. The security model was "be a good citizen." Graphics programming meant writing to a big buffer and then copying it to the screen. Oh your native language isn't representable in ASCII? It reads right-to-left? You are colorblind and need to apply a color transform to the display? Too bad. Those things aren't "clean and simple" code and the team of 30-something 1337 guys that wrote wasn't imagining you when deciding how the program would work.

Also it's not like these programs aren't still available. Did you write this comment using lynx? Do you do your finances with "gnome spreadsheet?" Do you listen to music with WinAmp 2.0? Do you moan in frustration every time you find a long, informative Wikipedia article, undoubtedly written by someone who doesn't understand cache lines, or even CSS? I don't even though I used to (well not the last one). I've moved on to objectively better things.

We're way, way better off with lower barriers and increased participation because it's additive. Despite electron being a thing or Visual Studio ushering in an era of "GUI builder + simple callback" apps, suckless still exists.