I can relate to that feeling intimately.

The intellectual content of programming has definitely changed since the simpler times which were, for me, formative. There's a combinatoric explosion of proper nouns, frameworks and libraries, and doing anything seems to entail 95% of time spent pouring over 27 browser tabs of API references.

This wasn't what made me love programming when I did systems programming in C as a teenager, and it's a different skill set. I wrote things like highly asynchronous & modular MUDs, chat servers, etc. Sure, one had to consult man pages of system calls once in a while, but fundamentally, it was much more of a closed system with a straightforward standard library and few dependencies. Of course, some of that is because my tinkering wasn't subordinated to economic imperatives or Enterprise Business Rules, but I do think it was qualitatively different in a more objective way, too. Now, it's an overwhelming river of gewgaws that each have their own APIs, conventions, methodologies, life cycle, etc.

It doesn't help that a lot of these gewgaws are clearly conceived for the same reasons academic advisors conceive schools of thought and seed conferences with spam publications relating to them by their pet graduate students. Maybe I'm just old, but it seems to me a lot of fashionable frameworks and doodads are more about O'Reilly book royalties, speaking engagements, consulting projects and *Con registration fees.