The amount of hidden engineering in Analog systems is mind blowing. Imagine how many hours were spent in a lab figuring out the exact right timings, chemical mixtures, and circuit design needed to make modern Cinema exist as we know it.
Every generation has its challenges, but we can be greatful that the generation before us gave us new ones. It has not always been the case.
I certainly don't miss the days of adjusting tint settings, headroom, over-scan and interlacing. Digital isn't without its issues of course, but even a lot of those trace their history back to analogue hacks - article case in point.
There is this side effect of digital lowering the bar though. Back in the analogue days, you needed to be a wizard to get anything done, which meant a lot of the people then seemed to care about the details more than they do now. Digital makes everything so easy that anyone can do it, which can go both ways.
Spinning rust drives store analog magnetics that get error corrected to digital. Same with electron potentials in ram. Same with SSDs. Signals over HDMI are converted to analog to display.
Sure, it's nice to deal with crisp neat digital signals... But to get there, you always need to deal with analog.
That's why people like Leonardo da Vinci could exist, the scope of human understanding was much smaller and so their work was much more wide-reaching and foundational. Today, you can dedicate your life's work to some hyper-specific problem in a very specific field. Tomorrow, this work might seem fundamentally primitive or foundational in the way that previous generations are perceived.
Later these were declared wrong, considered harmful, having bad smell, not passing code review and it all became a boring task of combining lego blocks. Sure these analog guys had insane tricks in their sleeves, but our “collective industry” would probably stigmatize them immediately if met today.
Even if you map Internet protocols to the OSI model -- which is imprecise at best -- TCP represents the transport layer, and IP the network layer. They're not a single component.
We’ve just moved it.
Hell, just look at ffmpeg commandline if you miss some complexity in your life