[JohnFen]

I'm also an old-timer, from slightly before personal computers were a thing.

> There were many defects that we just lived with.

There were, indeed! What the most common defects look like is a bit different now than then, but I don't think software now is generally any less buggy than software then. The main difference is that now software is increasingly unreliable in the specific sense that it updates so frequently. Very frequent updates mean that things are constantly in flux. In my view, that alone is a decline in software quality.