But COBOL developers resisted modern tooling. A coworker of mine tells the story of when he was working alongside an old mainframe hand more than 25 years ago, and was trying to explain to him how modern IDEs work. The mainframe guy gave him a disdainful look and said "That ain't how computing is done, kid."
Now what the guys above the programmers' paygrade knew was that the aim of software development wasn't really code, it was value delivered to customer. If 300k lines if AI slop deliver that value quickly, they can be worth much more than the 20k lines of beautiful human-written code.
I'd suspect folk with a terminal first approach probably have much stronger understandings of what is going on under the hood which makes approaching new repositories a lot easier if nothing else.
Alternatively, maybe folk who're exposed to more codebases are the best off.
By "modern IDE" I meant something like Turbo Pascal, as compared with the (at best) ISPF-based editor the mainframe guy was using. This took place in the early 90s.
Now what the guys above the programmers' paygrade knew was that the aim of software development wasn't really code, it was value delivered to customer. If 300k lines if AI slop deliver that value quickly, they can be worth much more than the 20k lines of beautiful human-written code.