I've developed a lot of iOS apps for over a decade and have yet to see any semblance of the "nice developer experience" you're mentioning.
Sure it had quirks (codesigning issues, weird errors from underlying C-level calls, ObjC "primitives" bot playing nicely with C primitives without boxing etc.) but I generally loved the experience especially around WYSIWYG of storyboards.
That must have been on very, very archaic hardware, by your own words.
Simply opening a storyboard without editing anything would also trigger file changes. I'm glad storyboards are gone.