Nothing is wrong. Things got more complex and segmented and specialized in. That's just how an industry grows. I mean look at how many jobs, companies, and careers were created just around the invention of the "smart phone". In 1999 none of those really existed. Sure you could play the snake game on your phone, but I think the app store is a little more complex. Anyway, software pushes hardware to its limits, and then hardware pushes software to its limits, and the cycle goes around and around. With the invention of the smart phone, you got to see hardware push software to its limits, creating all these extra layers of coding that most of us old schoolers arent fond of. And now (in my opinion), the AI and Cryptocurrency GPU/ASIC movements are pushing hardware limits. So I'd expect to see lots of innovation in that arena and also lots of greybeards claiming "We dont need all these fancy different processors, back in my day we used a CPU farm and it worked just fine and why do we need all this".

On the other hand I know what you mean because I cut my teeth on coding VB6 and Delphi (Borland anyone?) applications in middle school (where are my Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM app masters at?). It was fun, and easier than todays craziness. And people wrote more client software instead of making everything a web service. We also had zone alarm and people got hacked left and right and windows BSOD and all the fun of the 90's and repeated unknown socket errors on winsocks. I also felt like the programming world had more curiosity and self-sufficient people, as opposed to being so heavily money, convert, social, latest tech driven. It feels like everything now is a rinse, repeat, sell to FAANG cycle.