I get what this is saying but on the other hand...

Programmers now:

💪 Can spin up a minimum viable product in a day

💪 Writes web applications that handle millions or even billions of requests per second

💪 Remote code execution and memory related vulnerabilities are rarer than ever now

💪 Can send data across the world with sub 1 second latency

💪 The same PCIe interface is now 32x faster (16x PICe 1 was 8GB/s, while PCIe 6 is 256GB/s)

💪 The same wireless bands now have more throughput due to better radio protocols and signal processing

💪 Writes applications that scale across the over 100 cores of modern top of the line processors

💪 JIT and garbage collection techniques have improved to the point where they have a nearly imperceptible performance impact in the majority of use cases

💪 Most bugs are caught by static analysis and testing frameworks before release

💪 Codebases are worked on by thousands of people at the same time

💪 Functional programming, which is arguably far less bug prone, is rapidly gaining traction as a paradigm

💪 Far more emphasis on immutability to the point where many languages have it as the default

💪 Virtual machines can be seamlessly transferred from one computer to another while they're running

💪 Modern applications can be used by people anywhere in the world regardless of language, even things that were very difficult to do in the past like mirroring the entire interface to allow an application that was written for left to right languages to support right to left

💪 Accessibility features allow people who are blind, paralyzed, or have other disabilities to use computers just as well as anyone else

Just wanted to provide come counter examples because I'm not a huge fan of the "programmers are worse than they were back in the 80s" rethoric. While programmers today are more reliant on automated tools, I really disagree that programmers are less capable in general than they were in the past.