This cuts both ways. If you were an average programmer in love with FreePascal 20 years ago, you'd have to trudge in darkness, alone.

Now you can probably create a modern package manager (uv/cargo), a modern package repository (Artifactory, etc) and a lot of a modern ecosystem on top of the existing base, within a few years.

10 skilled and highly motivated programmers can probably try to do what Linus did in 1991 and they might be able to actually do it now all the way, while between 1998 and now we were basically bogged down in Windows/Linux/MacOS/Android/iOS.