Those IDEs sucked compared to what you can download in 5 minutes for free today. The number of libraries available (and where you could find them) was miniscule, and most had very bad documentation for beginners.
People here talking like we've made no progress in the last few decades... which we're that true then that'd also contradict their point and only agree with you... I'm really confused looking at all these replies
Tbh, I'm not sure I agree. I program in vim and the terminal. I get way more benefit out of that than VSCode. Regardless, things have improved dramatically. Hell, Linux is way more user friendly than it was even a decade ago.
With Vim and the terminal can I set conditional breakpoints, watches, and back in the day when I did bit twiddling in C, debug stack corruption and look at the assembly that the compiler was creating first each line? With JetBrsins ReSharper using Visual Studio, there are hundreds of guaranteed safe project wide refactoring you can do [1] and a lot of various boiler plate code it can autogenerate.
Not to mention the dark days of Window GUI development. How exactly is Vim better than a modern IDE?
[1] Yes I know all bets are off when you are using reflection.
