I'm not sure it's an HN bubble so much as a people under a certain age bubble. Smartphones in the modern sense have only been mainstream for a bit over 10 years. The internet was only mainstream for about 10 years before that. But a lot of people seem to assume that we were hunting woolly mammoths with flint spears before that time.

Yes today's communications are nice but we really didn't need GPS or cell phones to leave the house however primitive paper maps and, yes, some degree of planning seem.