I think it's only at the real low-level or hardware/assembly or, for instance, a bit above the stack, say, optimizing a data model or fine-tuning a DB engine for a given domain, that the old timers would really shine.
I see it in my daily life: my dad was a Fortran programmer way before I was born, so, maybe you know... 1970s or something like that. He was actually very good at his job, getting a research position doing some serious programming work that was seen as groundbreaking at the time, doing some finite element modeling on extremely resource constrained environments, probably what we would call data-oriented programming today, but taken to its extreme....
However, he didn't really keep up with programming after a few years, shifting to MATLAB based tasks for some university courses he lectures... and I feel that the complexity of today is just too much for him to grasp as it was. It's just too many moving parts and too many layers of abstraction to sift through.
By the same account, I expect your typical developer of a regular company, myself included, seniors included, etc, etc, to be completely lost if they had to optimize code for a given hardware and needed to write some assembly, or whatever, disassemble some JVM class files, etc.