IIRC Borland Delphi was the most popular tool back then for making Win32 apps since it was so easy to use.
Unironically the answer is yes. I've been watching this for at least 15 years.
I think one inflection point is when everybody who was coming up became accustomed to GC languages. Within a decade of that trend starting, nobody could reason about memory anymore.
With the AI boom we're going through another inflection point. When coding is synonymous with using an LLM, nobody will be aware of how anything works (or doesn't)
From Android to whatever web framework they’re peddling as development solutions, these are not designed for efficiency, but for time-to-market and consumption by front-end developers.
AI has accelerated this because it's becoming harder to detect the frauds.
There is a certain amount of truth to that I think
I do not think anybody was “smarter”. There were smart and less smart people then and now.
But the “typical” practice changes. And that changes what you get. I think your “typical” programmer is more productive today in terms of what they can accomplish. But that work is going to be built at a higher level of abstraction and likely a lower level of run-time efficiency. As a percentage, fewer people understand or take into account the lower level details.
It is not just about new tech. After all, I can write all my code in RISC-V assembler. And I can manually allocate memory and manipulate pointers in C#. It is just not what people normally do these days.
The average programmer back then was probably far more knowledgeable of the low-level details.
It was a matter of having access to the right (although limited) resources such as Petzold’s book, Codeproject and experimentation. There was no big rush, no start-up hustler mentality and most importantly hardware resources mattered a lot and it was a point of pride to create efficient software.
The development culture of present time is the opposite of that: developers are drowning in documentation, the default solution is technically inferior and the hustler mentality’s dominating.