> I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked
That's a very romanticized view. 2000s tech is of course not useless, it was a good plateau of quality and diversity of abilities, very foundational if you want to phrase it that way. But we've seen many evolutions and smaller revolutions since then, many improvements which are making everything significant better, easier, faster.
> textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
That's a very small, focused selection of technologies. Most of them are nearly dead or have evolved several steps since then for a reason.
> Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
The liberty of the whole Webstack today is already very awesome. It allows building personalized complex applications on a high level with very little effort. Not to forgotten all the apps which are allowing Add-ons now. Firefox, VS Code or Obsidian today are blowing everything away we had 25 years in terms of ability and customizability for most people, and yes, that includes Emacs even today. I know tech-people often don't understand this, but interfaces and simplicity matters for a lot of cases and people.
But if we are talking about my personal favourites, it would be apps like rofi, fzf and tilling-WMs like AwesomeWM and QTile. The amount of benefit I get from a simple fuzzy-selector and a simple shell- or python-script is insane. I don't think that was available in 2000. Similar topic would be Unicode and icon-fonts. Very small scalled improvements, but very deep benefit for everyone not living in the US-bubble. Language-situation in 2000 was awful.
Sqlite and permanently evolving Postgres are also great benefits. Python3 is very awesome, Rust and Go are really beneficial in terms of speed and security. Comparing all this with the security-nightmares of the 2000s is insane. Though, to be fair, security 25 years ago wasn't as bad as 20 or 15 years ago IIRC, because it was still escalating at the time.
And let's not talk about genre-software...I'm pretty sure even trash like Adobes products have today more useful abilities than they had 25 years ago, it's just the other situation which has become worse. But then again, we have now many more good software like Gimp, Blender, who knows what (I'm not in creative software)...