A few days ago, we had a thread about games that released in 2004, and I made a comment that ended with "old shit is better." And then I started thinking about it... old things are better.
Case in point: vehicles. I needed a truck for the family farm, and I went shopping. Quickly I realized that 1) newer 3/4 ton diesels are designed to fail as a revenue stream and 2) buying a $80,000 truck that will probably need at least one, maybe two $5,000 service visits before it hits six digit mileage wasn't in the cards. So I bought a 20 year old truck... that every mechanic who has seen it has tried to buy. Total cost was less than a Tabroma with the same mileage.
This continues on to just about everything. My house was built before I was born, and has the original air conditioner, stove and hot water heater. The original fridge died a few years ago, and the washer and dryer finally shuffled off this mortal coil last year. I doubt, seriously, that any of the replacement appliances lasts a decade, much less two or three.
Printers? Unless it's Japanese, don't buy a new one. HP will remote control your printer, if you opt in to the program (which they don't make clear what it is), and Xerox is a crapshoot if it works out of the box. Meanwhile, I have seen cheap Brother lasers go to half a million pages easily.
Tractors? Buy a new John Deere, and if it breaks, you either have Deere's mechanic fix it, or it stays broken. (Keep making your payments, please.) Meanwhile, you can buy an older Deere or Yanmar tractor and keep it going forever.
The modern world is starting to give me serious 40k vibes. Almost nobody knows how things work, new things are bad knockoffs, and there are mutants everywhere.
An UHD Blu Ray is objectively better in any just about any metric you could come up with than a VHS tape (or even a DVD which would have been the state of the art in 2004). They are better than what a movie theater would have had access to in 2004. Though of course there's not much being produced that's worth watching at such high quality, but that's a human problem and not a technical one.
Try running Windows XP on a modern computer: it will blow you away with how fast and responsive it is. It will perform like 20 years ago you would have expected a computer of today to perform.
There is still good tech being produced today. The problem is that the default state of this tech is for it to not work very well, and to make it work well requires that you become an expert. Sadly this is a problem in many domains including health, medicine, nutrition, law, etc...
I suspect "making modern tech not suck" is going to be a growth industry in the coming years/decades. Or taking the good aspects of modern tech and applying it to older tech to get the best of both worlds.
There are several companies and big YouTube channels that do retrocomputing on modern machines. I think the next big thing is going to be ground up phone design.
What I'm thinking about isn't "retrocomputing" so much as it's "use old methodologies (which made designs efficient out of necessity) to develop new technology". An obvious example of this in the computing world would be "If you need to make a GUIs, develop it using the Win32 API (like we would have done in 2004) instead of developing a web app and embedding a fucking web browser in your executable".
But on the flip side, things like audio and video codecs are way better than they were in 2004, and there's no reason to not use them.
There probably is some overlap with "retrocomputing" though, just because so much modern software is in such a degraded state.