I need to re-read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to double check you haven't just grabbed an example from the last five minutes.
I have a contrarian view on Rome: it was good that it collapsed, though it would have been better if more effort were made to save works of knowledge and maintain expertise. Even with the consequences though, the collapse of Rome made way for the eventual rise of enlightenment thinking and modern republican democracy. I doubt that would have happened under the Roman imperium.
This is what Rome's leadership looked like by the imperial period. It was pretty bleak.
https://www.walksinsiderome.com/blog/about-rome/the-scandalo...
Also there's a whole bad history meme about how Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria. The bulk of destruction was done by imperial Rome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_...
Roman statue avatar Xitter accounts can suck it. We have more freedom and prosperity today by many orders of magnitude, and we build greater marvels too: space stations, reusable rockets, 3nm integrated circuits. We've taught the sand to think for f's sake.
... which leads me to yet another view I sometimes feel is contrarian: Western civilization is not in a state of collapse.
Today we know more about economic cycles, natural disaster preparedness, population planning, pollution, etc., even if our leaders don't always do it.
The Javascript ecosystem.
* Isaac Newton lost his dad before he was born and his parents gave him up to live with relatives. He had a very rough childhood.
* Andre Carnegie's family went broke when he was a child, they had no money and had to restart their lives moving to the United States with basically nothing.
* Steve Jobs was adopted, though maybe not exactly poverty it still doesn't sound like a great way to grow up.
That's about 3/7 having rough childhoods and 4/7 having good or average.
Now that I think of it Ibn Khaldun is precisely this example of an accomplished thinker that went through the hardest times possible in the Old World : he went through the Black Death in the 1340, his whole family died while travelling to reunite with him after many years of forced separation, he was imprisoned, deported, exiled many times...
To be honest i think the adage itself is not true, just popular BS.
The meme is at least a few months older than the book, and most likely actually comes from a simplification of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, ... keep thinking of names of profoundly accomplished people in areas like science, business, sports, art, etc. Then tally up how many of them had traumatic hardscrabble origins. Not many. Most grew up middle class or better and had the benefit of good education, solid family life, and a stable society.
This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much.
The points brought up in this talk are valid though, but I don't think the answer is "good times." I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later." (Fixing it later usually involves enshittification.) There are other types of good times that favor more balanced sustainable business models, and those tend to encourage software with a bit more of a focus on quality.
I think there's some survivorship bias at work here too though. There was a lot of total crap software in the 80s and 90s that we don't remember. There were lots of DOS and Windows apps with horrible UI/UX that would crash your entire machine because operating systems were much less solid than they are today. Security almost didn't exist unless you were on a Unix-type OS or VMS, and even there it was pretty basic and coarse grained.
Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: it is much more bloated today. Some of that bloat is explainable by things like high-DPI displays and larger data sets, but much of it is a result of bad architecture and perverse incentives.