My current reality is that I'm a 33 year old working with 20 year olds who think they're geniuses who are going to take over the world in 5 years; from that viewpoint, I'm essentially a failed engineer because I didn't build a Facebook, Uber or AirBnB even though I had 10 years to do it.
5 years ago I was at a small bootstrapped startup and one of the worst engineers I've ever worked with was saying he'd expect to be a CTO of a mid-size startup in 5 years. He had just started his career. He managed to concoct quite an interesting fictional LinkedIn profile, while in reality he had almost no coding experience. He was a grifter.
In larger, established, tech companies this wasn't as prevalent but mostly because people were a bit more mature and respectful.
I guess it comes down to maturity. In startups and SMBs it was easy to find this attitude. Junior developers are often the most difficult.
Webapp coding is harder than it appears because of them. I haven't worked in a codebase without them.
But they're usually so unlikely to happen it's not worth fixing them all because it can lead to very specific and tricky code. So as long as the consequences of it occurring aren't really bad, I just leave it alone.
I'm 33 but I feel like I already have to make an effort to avoid the dinosaur label. I disagree with a lot of modern tech trends but I simply cannot express my view about them even though I could explain the problems very clearly and logically and can provide far better and simpler alternatives. Unfortunately, hype does not yield to reasoning... And sometimes, you're too far into the tech debt and it doesn't make financial sense to rewrite.