With the C64, you could literally understand what every single memory address on the machine did. You could hold the whole thing in your head. Coding on it was about as abstraction free as you could get, especially in assembly language.

Now, we run npm and have barely any idea of how any of it works. That makes sense in a way, things get bigger and more complex. For me at least, it's not fun in the way coding on a 8 or 16 bit computer is.