I don't believe progress is automatic, that's why I like hearing perspectives from people who have been around longer. When I hear the narrative from lots of older people that everything has gotten worse since their youth though, I think you can understand my skepticism. Especially given as your opinions are not universal among people who have a lot of experience.
Anybody today can, in seconds, download dozens of production-ready language runtimes and get started writing programs with a great IDE experience, for free! No cost at all. And this is now a fundamental assumption of software development.
I don't take it for granted because I have some idea of how far we've come, but I read people like you complaining about not being able to work with new build tools and I'll be honest, I assume that you've been left behind technologically and haven't kept up. I'm sure that's unfair, but you don't give these tools credit for their upsides (using new languages is much easier than it used to be, and development with them also scales much better), and you still haven't really explained the downsides fully. Even the C and C++ community is slowly moving in the direction of package managers and integrated tooling.
Sure, when I was younger I remember trying every single package from my distro or that was featured in slashdot or that appeared on freshmeat.net etc. These days my default attitude toward a new piece of tech is a shrug, and the list of techs that I (wilingfully or not) do not learn and skip over is becoming larger and larger with time. I do not believe that's because I'm becoming lazy though; fatigue sure is a thing, but we're living at a time when our universe is expanding faster than the speed of learning anyway. And I believe you too are staying ignorant of most of novelties.
Do I stick to my tools longer than necessary before acknowledging true progress?
Possibly, but not always. I've been pushing ruby over perl/php/python, ngnx over apache, I adopted systemd quite early for some of its practical merits, I pushed for containerd over docker, for nix then guix over Debian, and PL wise I've enthusiastically explored mercury, ATS, and rust way before it was a thing (then decided against it). So although it's true that I would not feel confident in a conversation with young JS programmers I could still name a long list of interesting new techs they have never heard about! :)
One of the hardest thing in a software dev's job used to be to learn to say "no" to product-designers and management. Nowadays it's to say "no" to shiny new techs. Many times this pays off, since most of tech novelties shine only for a brief moment before being superseded by another. The price to pay is to arrive a bit late to the party from time to time. One have to be very passionate and picky to not end up stranded in an isolated ecosystem.
You mentioned IDEs many time. Beware that they are often times such isolated ecosystems. You would not believe how strongly java devs thought no one would ever need to venture outside of Netbean... No I mean Eclipse. No, VScode. Meanwhile, I'm still wondering what problem those are trying to solve; do I have a problem I haven't diagnosed? Must not be the speed of writing or navigating code though, given I'm usually amongst the fastest around.
In programming as well as in real life, things own you as much as you own them.
I can tell you in my case, older folks who still program can be VERY picky on what new tools they elect to invest time in learning. When we elect to "keep up", we do it in the general case and I'll tell you why from my point of view, there have been times in my life when I've chosen to dive into details of a tool, that I would then be disappointed in what I discover and now this time is spent, I cannot get this time back. When we're young, time is cheap.
Look, "keeping up in detail" is the domain for youth because youth has the luxury of the spare time to do it.
Besides, being left behind is actually the destination for all of us simply as the result of our own mortality. I'm suspicious that you might think that the fact some folks "haven't kept up" indicates an error on their part rather than a very valid choice.
heh and in my case I'm just not that good a programmer so theres that.
Anybody today can, in seconds, download dozens of production-ready language runtimes and get started writing programs with a great IDE experience, for free! No cost at all. And this is now a fundamental assumption of software development.
I don't take it for granted because I have some idea of how far we've come, but I read people like you complaining about not being able to work with new build tools and I'll be honest, I assume that you've been left behind technologically and haven't kept up. I'm sure that's unfair, but you don't give these tools credit for their upsides (using new languages is much easier than it used to be, and development with them also scales much better), and you still haven't really explained the downsides fully. Even the C and C++ community is slowly moving in the direction of package managers and integrated tooling.