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People from the 1980s are still alive and they’re not making anything more impressive than anyone else.

These people weren’t magicians only held back by a lack of computer power, they were (again, “are”) regular people trying to maximize their output given their resources.

Let’s say you go back and hand a powerful computer to them. What would Mac Paint look like? I’m sure it would have colors (assuming you also have them a monitor), probably a lot more of those goofy and useless textured fills nobody wants, layers, probably some filters, higher resolutions, and probably simple brush strokes. But do you really think they would manage to implement any of the seriously impressive features that modern Photoshop has? Content aware fill? AI upscaling? Of course not. It would probably take them a long time to get smart selection working in a halfway decent manner.