Those days were different. You could say what people are doing in months to years today, in many ways people back then were doing in days to weeks.
Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you?
I remember managers asking Java programmers how much time it would take to get something done, and get timelines on months and years. They would come to us Perl programmers and get it done in a week.
The era didn't last long. I would joke around our team saying, ideally a Java programmer with 10 years experience was somewhat like like a Perl programmer with 1 year experience. This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone.
Do you not? The pace of anthropic/Claude tool development is pretty bonkers, AI hype reminds me of the 90s a lot.