High level programming languages and internet-oriented package managers have definitely made programmers more productive. Smaller teams can do more.
I don't think we expected the result though: major products can end up spending on libraries written by a single maintainer!
Related Posts
Are there any package managers that treat changelogs as a first class concept?
I end up looking for a CHANGELOG.md or a CHANGES.txt in the source code repository every time. The lack of standard prevents package hosting services being able to show changes.
I've heard of 'blub languages', where you don't realise that other languages have better abstractions until you've experienced them.
I think the same thing happens with individual features. I've seen several C++ folks miss variadic generics in Rust, but I've not written enough C++ to feel it.
Coming from JS or Python, imports in Rust feel weird. They're entirely optional aliases for fully qualified symbols, which are always available.
I don't know of many other languages where you can just start using libraries. Java is the only one I can think of.