Everything is just a Turing machine. Everything is just a function. Everything is the Conway’s game of life.
The fact that all of these forms are equally expressive is quite a surprise when you first discover this. Importantly, it doesn’t mean that any one set of axioms is “more correct” than the other. They’re equally expressive.
That one ends in a tarpit where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
Real development IMX is not much different. People just have low standards for "interesting" nowadays, and also have vastly increased access to previous solutions for increasingly difficult problems. But while modern programming languages might be more pleasant to use in many ways, they have relatively little to do with the combined overall progress developers have made. Increased access to "compute" (as they say nowadays), effort put into planning and design, and the simple passage of time are all far more important factors in explaining where we are now IMO.
It's like being mad that hammer was so successful we invented screw to improve on it's greatest hits.