Programming in the past was far easier, you had better tools, like Visual Basic, and Delphi. They had excellent built in documentation, with working code examples. Delphi even included an installation builder, for bundling your program. It all just worked. Your program would run in any Windows environment you or your customers were ever likely to use.

For the most part, those programs written with those tools still work.

Today everything is update on the fly, and subject to random breakage. GIT is better, everything else has gone downhill.