[jpalawaga]

the imaging equipment that goes into space is definitely state of the art, though the requirements for it would have been locked for some time.

It's not like the JWST folks said "we're going to fly a canon 5D!" and then were 20 years out of date when the JWST flew. Pretty much all of the sensors are built from scratch, using very advanced/specialized techniques. Given that the tech is all custom, including some stuff that probably had to be invented or otherwise figured out to begin with, it's hard to say the "tech is old," given it's just now flying.

In other ways, some of it looks old: one of JWST's main sensors images at 1024x1024. There might be other constraints at play here—how much data you get per pixel is directly related to your telescope's angular resolution and sensitivity of sensor.

Here's a page that discusses the JWST's sensors:

https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/innovations/infrared.htm...

The journal article linked at the bottom of that page is also quite interesting as it talks about the science of the sensor technology and also the background of astronomer's requirements too. You can find it easily on google with a `filetype:pdf` filter.