Great point. I'm in my thirties, my boss when I started was a mainframe systems programmer for years. They had critical business process on an unsupported platform and this guy and a colleague wrote a pretty decent TCP/IP stack for it. They also were experts in some random business processes that were ridiculously important. They were jack of all trades. When I got there they had moved into monitoring and management and were reasonably capable NT and HPUX performance guys.
Now there's literally a platoon of BAs, java programmers and others maintaining the successor system.
Now thinking about it a bit, there may be a sort of survivor bias thing going on. The "older tech workers" are largely the ones who stayed in tech, rather than going into management. We're the ones who managed to keep ourselves competitive, and survive the politics, for a few decades.
You see it with old timer SEs from companies like IBM and HP and even Apple... these are folks that love solving problems and are adept at it. They are also always fighting management who is completely clueless.
One guy from one of those companies figured out a huge problem and probably generated $30M of sales. They laid him off in a random culling of the herd.
The only place you see those types of folks getting developed now are in cloud services where some of the cast off junior SEs from the big companies are doing similar things there.
Now there's literally a platoon of BAs, java programmers and others maintaining the successor system.