Ergonomics were much, much worse before. I had my Commodore 64 hooked up to the TV in the living room. It was not easy to program using an old tube TV displaying text with 320x200 resolution graphics.
Which is why the first thing 1980's game developers would do when getting out of their bedrooms into proper offices, was migrating into development systems based on systems like VMS/UNIX or similar, and then upload the games into the Speccy and C64 via the extensions port.
