What you are describing at the old company is not a failure of old tools, but rather a failure of management/employee self-management at that company.

Any tool can be used to do good or evil. They were using old tools to do evil things-- namely, writing bad code.

The only caveat here is that if I had to maintain bad bash scripts or bad koobieboobie cicd automated shlalala, I'd always choose bad bash scripts, as the blast radius is smaller and easier to reason about.