I think you're clinging a bit too heavily to the "good old days". It's ironic how this entire thread has turned into a mix of people either
1) complaining that modern technology is too complex and complicated
or
2) complaining that modern job applicants have lost the skills necessary to run things
There is much I love about today and I look forward to the future. I was just stating my observations. And yes, `git deploy prod` is a fancy FTP, but probably even worse than FTP if the build actually happens on the production server (which is something I saw more than once) and causes a production outage (also saw more than once).
Complexity is not a virtue. It is a dangerous resilience anti-pattern and should not be lionised.
Unless you're insinuating that things in fact remain simple but the complaints of complexity are down to the stupidity of commenters.
Its only innovative in an 'Apple released it and now everyone is on the bandwagon' way.
I've worked at companies that were using CVS for config file management in the 90s, the concept was already in play, it just wasn't as mainstream and didn't have a trendy infrastructure as code branding.
I was specifically referencing an old fad (might still be a thing but I haven't run into it in years) where production is a remote and a dev pushes their main branch to it to deploy. Yes, version control is amazing and it was something I used a bunch before my hiatus, but back then, it was usually SVN IIRC.