It's safe to say that most people romanticize their past experience. Anyone's "golden age" is someone else's "end times".

Software has always sucked [1]. "Software crisis" was coined in 1968. There has been no period of time since that it got any better. Trauma just doesn't carry the same way that triumphs do.

Perhaps people do not actually learn from their mistakes after all.

[1]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks