It's a good bit of rhetorical slight of hand. Anything that existed in any form prior to the date isn't new (even if it was only in an experimental, near-unusable form). Anything that exists today but hasn't yet had much impact on the world is a toy.
The only things that remain are those few which appeared seemingly out of nowhere and rose to prominence over a short period of time.
Yeah. Sure, there were service-based architectures (SOA), some automated testing (so CI/CD I guess), containers have been around forever (BSD jails and then Solaris Zones), configuration management, etc., etc. But all of those things are vastly different than they were 25 years ago. [EDIT: Not 15. Can't do math this morning. Though even 15 is pre-iPhone/most mobile.]
This is an "Oh, the cloud is just timesharing" take.
Generally in agreement with most of this (and others takes that are similar).
Except that Linux containers are a huge regression on what BSD jails gave us 20 years ago. They’re catching up for sure, but it’s still just badly reinventing a wheel that already exists, for philosophical, political, or selfish reasons.
The only things that remain are those few which appeared seemingly out of nowhere and rose to prominence over a short period of time.