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.
Not really. Those systems were working years ago and after many attempts to duplicate their functionality they still remain. Many of the lessons learned years ago have been forgotten.