I started programming in an era where personal computers had only 640kB of RAM. That's right, kB, not MB.
Today, it's easier to get something done because there are so many solutions and libraries available on the internet from which you can copy-paste. In those days, one had to _know _the language or the tool very thoroughly and come up with your own solutions.
OTOH, in those days, programming languages were simpler. JavaScript, for instance, is a lot harder to learn and master (think about closures, promises, ES6 classes etc) as compared to say, C.
So, I would say it cuts both ways. Today, it's harder to learn the tools, but easier to get things done. In those days, it was easy to learn the tools but you were on your own, without much help from the internet.