Why can't it be the same now, indeed?
Everything should be faster and easier in modern programming languages, frameworks and tools, but very often it isn't. Why?
I'm not against learning new tech as part of the job, as it can be a motivating factor for the developers. At the same time we can't ignore that for a startup, it is probably better to use a known technology so that they don't end up fighting the framework as their needs grow beyond the basic tutorial/blog post
Here's a suggestion: If someone finds themselves sending multiple patches to the framework or implementing missing database libraries, they may have chosen the wrong framework/language. It can be very motivating, but the time could have been spent on improving the product.
new things are not always better, and inexperienced devs just use the hype-of-the-month framework to build stuff that miserably fails- see the articles from today about Event Sourcing and CQRS for example...