@thindil good point - thanks for pointing out the potential "survivorship bias" there.

But even when we take into account the "fallen buildings" from that era, I still feel like some of that craft has been lost.

When I look at some of that old code (I'd say up to mid 1980s), I see mastering of bitmasks, hammering data into registers and memory blocks, craft of memory allocation and usage (some of the coders from those years even wrote their own little garbage collectors before Java and friends came around, or were masters in optimizing stack usage/unwinding). In short, doing great things with the little resources that were available to them.

Even if most of those "buildings" have "fallen", and we admire the few that are still functioning at the edge of our solar system, it doesn't mean that the techniques of the time weren't authentic engineering wonders that we've lost in an age where we take so many abstractions for granted.