Compensation: well, this is the UK so it's never been anywhere near US levels, but it was certainly competitive with other white-collar jobs, and there was huge spike briefly around 2001 until the "dotcom boom" burst and a whole load of us were laid off.
Tooling: well, in the late 90s I got a copy of Visual Studio. I still have Visual Studio open today. It's still a slow but effective monolith.
The big difference is version control: not only no git, but no svn. I did my undergraduate work in CVS, and was briefly exposed to SourceSafe (in the way that one is exposed to a toxin).
Most of the computers we used back in 2000 were less powerful than an RPi4. All available computers 30 years ago would be outclassed by a Pi, and the "supercomputers" of that day would be outclassed by a single modern GPU. This .. makes less difference than you'd expect to application interactive performance, unless you're rendering 3D worlds.
We ran a university-wide proto-social-network (vaguely similar to today's "cohost") off a Pentium with a 100MB hard disk that would be outclassed by a low-end Android phone.
Another non-obvious difference: LCD monitors weren't really a thing until about 2000 - I was the first person I knew to get one, and it made a difference to reducing the eyestrain. Even if at 800x600 14" it was a slight downgrade from the CRT I had on my desk.