I wonder how much of the "old fart sadness" going around is about loss of control. Tech used to be a thing that could be not just understood but controlled. Then we moved to libraries and frameworks for everything. Then to renting a place to run our code and then renting the external services it used. And now, the new powerful AI thing can really only be owned by big corporations - no hacker control, just would-be-hackers as end users (anathema!).

I tend to see this as a larger societal trend than just computing technology, so maybe my own age is approaching "old fart-hood," too.