Were the 2006 sony santa monica programmers smarter then us when they delivered God of War 2 for the PS2 on its tiny resources?
Usually the constraints force you to become inventive and smart. Put a hard limit of 128 mb per tab on web browsers and suddenly both the developers of the browsers and the web developers will become extremely smart.
The over abundance of resources has made the majority of software engineers lazy. If we once again live in scarcity times - suddenly people will start to ask why we need 8 abstraction layers to do something.
I would guess they were quite smart bunch, but no superhuman - just people tasked with extremely challenging task, trying to jury rig something on the edge of possibility. My guess is that they took their tasks more seriously and to heart.