Comment by jmalicki

Totally! I mean, the same could be said of painstakingly hand coding assembly language - that today's developers haven't done so is what leads us to bloated electron apps, so there is something lost!

But the larger scale system design is stronger than ever. Today, distributed systems, version control, including branching, stacked PRs etc., VMs/containers, idempotency, multimaster ACID databases, all of these things were probably never achievable in the world when the best devs had to spend their time poring over assembly language every day. Losing that skill allowed them more time to build other ones!