I know of many critical national defense systems running on computer made in the 1960’s through the early 1980’s. Why? Because they work. The engineers of that time knew how to create systems the run. Today’s computer programmers just love to create cool looking things and managers don’t know a thing abuout computers and don’t know how to make such systems.
I don’t think programmers or codes from yesteryear are *inherently* “better”. It’s more a case, I think, of if you have a code that has years of field use under its belt, then presumably it’s been “battle tested” and had the bugs wrung out of it. For large, complex software, that’s worth a lot.
Put another way you’d rather have version 10.0 than version 1.0 of just about anything.