The sentence: Firstly, because they used to be written sufficiently well that they never crashed, because competent people wrote them. IS an appeal to a golden age. Because it's not true. People did write services that crashed and sysadmins had to work around them. I know this to be the case because I had to work with a particularly egregious example. Whether you think the older methods for managing them were better is one thing, but those problems existed and they caused lots of damage.