alt Hacker NewsYes!
Each step in abstraction we've made had people who felt uncomfortable at the level of magic they were accepting. At one point in the 70s/80s, traditionalists were arguing that C itself was too high level. Then in the 90s and early 00s, that languages like Python and garbage collection were absurd: a "good" programmer doesn't need them and they give up too much control. Then as web development ramped up, people entered the "Javascript is slop" phase into "React is slop" phase.
Anytime the barrier to entry is reduced and some skill or profession becomes more focused on output than the ego of the professionals, you can bet a counter-culture of people will rise up to oppose it. It's a threat to their sense of "betterness" and/or the (perceived) value of their career.
While elitism and ego have certainly played a role in the dialog since the beginning of computing, this perspective conflates those issues with the very real technical arguments against the listed technologies. C and other contemporary languages had their limitations; you were sacrificing flexibility and potentially speed for a more pleasant and maintainable development experience. Garbage collection dates from long before the 90s and has always been controversial, in no small part from differing tastes and opinion on whether other memory management techniques are truly more difficult. The assumption that these technologies lowered the barrier to entry may be the crux of much of the argumentation.