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Completely agreed. The tile based graphics that pushed the limits of a mid-80's computer (and in some cases required special hardware) can now be done off the cuff with totally naive code in a matter of a couple hours:
https://github.com/mschaef/waka-waka-land
There's lots more room these days for developing the story, etc. if that's the level of production values you wish to achieve.
Did a my first paid software development pretty much exactly 30 years ago, specifically I was hired to port a word processor from the Amiga to the Commodore 64. So my experience is mostly related to the word of 8-bit home computers, already a dying world by then, and I wouldn't be able to tell how working in an office was like as a was still in school at the time and it was a side project.
The source code is here, by the way: https://github.com/mvindahl/interword-c64
Still, a few general observations about that particular corner and that particular time of software development:
> I’m not old enough to know how much that affected full computers
I recently helped someone open source a roguelike they wrote in the 90s - https://github.com/superjamie/alphaman-src
The source is terse as you describe, some parts are written in assembly, and strings are actually one big string with functions that extract substrings. There isn't a clear PRINT statement in the whole program.
All of this because he wanted the source to fit on one floppy.