If they're over 45, then they likely worked in the late 90s and early 00s. If they were like many of us, then they worked on at least some web applications back then. This was far before jQuery and even Prototype.js on the frontend. Java, PHP and Perl were commonly used on the backend (or where I lived, more often IIS with asp). But the start of the career of someone in their 50s and even 45+ was before any commonly-used framework in open source scripting languages used for web development (unless you consider PHP to be a framework).

Even Spring framework was only created in 2003 (I just checked to confirm). Symfony in PHP was 2005. And those took several years to catch on in their respective ecosystems.

Tons of companies had in-house frameworks back then. Who did you think wrote them?

Even if someone working back then never explicitly built a framework, they used design patterns that mirror today's frameworks. If not, they were writing spaghetti code (and to be fair, that was pretty common back then).

Based on your username and your assertion ("older than you"), you're what, 45? Have you forgotten what it was like back then?