John Carmack did praise restraint of resources when he recalled his early days working as a lone contractor and as an employee of Softdisk, when he and the team had to push out games on a very tight schedule.

I think this extends to other parts of life, too. I still remember that I fondly played a game over and over again back in high school, when I did not have the Internet and had to borrow CDs from my friends — but when I went into the university and had access to pretty much every game freely on the Intranet, I rarely do that anymore. That’s why I always think an abundance of X may not be the best option for me. That’s why probably includes money, too.

As a percentage of good to mediocre, maybe. Engineers of 40 years ago were probably better than engineers 20 years ago. Less of them and more constraints they had to deal with. Democratization of technology makes it easier for more people to use. It applies to programming as much as just using a computer.

I never buy these examples. Being a good engineer is more than purely resource optimization. I can think of many times over my career where resource optimization mattered but it’s not always a valuable undertaking.

20 years ago we were complaining about steam being bloated and unnecessary, we were 6 months off vista being a bloated mess and the Office Ribbon debacle being in full swing. PC games were often half baked console ports with atrocious performance and filled with game breaking bugs. Software was super rigid - there was no real cross platform support. We were just heading into the core 2 duo realm and it was a mess.

Engineers sucked then as much as they suck now

nobody said they were, they are related. if you don't understand why something is behaving a certain way you need to learn