They aren't right just because they're old. I could easily write the opposite comment:

I don't want to sell the greybeards' skills short, but I have less faith in them than the new generation (the most skilled part of the new generation; don't ignore sampling bias). The new generation has learnt the lessons of the old and improved on them, whereas many oldies stick to outdated technology like Autotools, Perl and Bash in the name of "if it kind of works half the time I can't be bothered to learn something better".

The bellwether for me is when devs doggedly stick to plaintext logs because "that's just how we've always done things".