When you sit down and just design a piece of code for hours as to not waste your compilation cycle, I would guess that you naturally end up being fairly crafty after some time.
When I learned C it was a given to code efficiently. Pointer manipulation and efficient structure packing was expected, and therefore taught. You'd rule out of an interview anyone who didn't easily grok it.
It's probably no surprise that the fastest GUI editor I've used to date ran on a 7.1MHz machine. Such is "progress"!
Most impressive, I think, is that it managed to be so fast and include smooth scrolling.
Anecdote: On a trip to the US (Boston), I once met Norm Miles, who, my US colleague said, was the creator of Brief.
The Brief editor is actually still available, here, and for free now:
Many of the modern conveniences might be expressive in the small (function level). But it quickly gets highly unexpressive as you move to a more global level. That is because this "expressiveness" is often achieved by arbitrary and non-orthogonal approaches, which increases dependencies and hinders modularity. In the end, it's only more convenient to paint yourself into a corner. Seen that in many codebases.