When I was a young developer all the "old farts" annoyed me with their seemingly static and stagnant attitudes. Some devs really were the epitome of "old man yelling at cloud" (pun intended). Onboarding fresh devs by yelling at them to never use the mouse and showing off your "development skills" by demonstrating your use of vim to work on a modern Spring Boot project is not helpful, it's just narcissist...
But as I grew older and more experienced, I started to really internalize why resistance to change was not always ultimately bad. Repercussions actually hit me for some bad decisions about new software, updates and the hot trends on the market and I was able to experience the resulting pain directly which was the "do not touch the hot plate but then I touched the hot plate" moment for me.
I looked directly into the trap after it was opened.
Also, older generations will always yell at younger generations for seemingly making everything worse. It's been like this since the advent of humanity and if that were objectively true then everything went straight downhill since 12,000 BC. I doubt it!
As a middle aged dude my goal is now to retain enough flexibility while valuing stability. There is a balance to be had and while I have grown to understand some older devs not ever moving away from certain antics it's important to not be unreasonable about it.
Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware.
The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries.
Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
In the late 70s and 80s Assembler, Pascal, C, Fortran, Modula-2, Forth, Lisp were all used to create CAD, GIS, robot control, symbolic math, abstract algebra, etc. type programs.
Many things became a lot easier with the resource abundance like having flat memory model with the 32bit systems in a stark contrast via the segment switch on 8086.