The average dev knows far far less today. Just how deeply people had to know hardware back then is a massive difference.

And if we look at the average dev today, most code is in the framework, or a node package, or composer package, and the average dev gets by via stack overflow or AI.

There are certainly devs that actually understand coding, but the average dev barely does. Most devs don't understand the underlying OS, the hardware, or externals such as databases at all. It's all abstracted away.

And coders back then had almost nothing abstracted away.