How is SE today less complex than 10 years ago? It seems to me that even as tools today are more powerful and basic compute and storage are cheaper, non-functional requirements have only ballooned.
e.g. Lotus 1-2-3 was probably far easier to develop than Google Sheets presently.
I don’t think the complexities of SE, on the whole, have changed substantially in the last 10 years. If anything the tooling has gotten better.
Lotus 1-2-3 was 40 years ago, not 10, but still. The Lotus devs, of which there were only a handful, were writing in ASM, for an insanely memory constrained platform. I bet Google Sheets is insanely complicated too, and has all the multiuser requirements. But those devs have all the resources of Google backing them up. I’d call it a push.
e.g. Lotus 1-2-3 was probably far easier to develop than Google Sheets presently.