Comment by bigiain

I think there's a very different perspective on this between people old enough to have written assembly for 8 bit cpus like 6502 or Z80 often with well under 64kb of total system memory - compared to people who grew up in the age where the "starting coding" choices were something like "Angular or React?" and each browser tab could consume a GB or two of memory.

I'm not trying to say "greybeards are better" or "younger developers don't understand fundamentals" - it's more that the learned/ingrained abstractions those two types of developers start from are very very different. People who were familiar with concepts like the 6502's zero page where you get faster performance because you can use 8 bit addressing to access the first 256 _bytes_ of memory, end up with different mental tools and thinking than, say, people who started out their development learning about asynchronous callbacks and promises. One isn't better or worse than the other - but they are very very different.

(Even today's "tiny" CPUs are commonly 32 bit multi core SOCs. ESP32 kinda took over what used to be done with 8bit atmel Arduino class CPUs)