I agree with you. I loved the old dos systems - I enjoyed tweaking the .bat files for my games to suit each individual game perfectly and I loved how the either worked or didn't. If they didn't it was my fault - simples.
And for the office I like Win 3.11. It didn't treat me like a moron (I'm looking at you WIndows 10) and actually expected me to think for myself. I felt involved, not like I just sat there and looked at things.
I learned to build my own computer because it was clean, quick and simple! These days - buy a laptop, press go, choose a few options and that's the extent of my involvement. Boring.
Yes! I too am one who's IT-eeth were cut in the latter 70s. Witnessed the evolution, freedom to learn and explore finally witnessing a once powerful source of innovation and education devolve into pure corporate controlled boredom.
I know there are still areas of interest but beyond AI (I got into it in the 80s for a bit, can't recall the OS/product) and we are seeing the fruits of that time grow but as a rule only as far as the risk-management sorts allow.
Loved the PC-DOS era, UNIX, SunIX (Solaris), DR-DOS, then laughed at Windows 1.0, 2.0 wondering what the heck were they thinking, until Win 3.x (fav was 3.15 - or was it 3.12? - good on Netware and stable). Basically like other weezer-geezers, it was fun!...
Far as modern GUI based OSs, Win 3.xx was really good, XP solid by the time they killed it off... then until Win 7 none were actually great...now i kinda had tuldate to 10 and an "important" update zorched my HDD's boot sector so the system only boots directly to CMOS. Drive is found its simply Windows Update just did something squirrely to the boot sector. I swore the was to be my last system used to earn a living...now i had to buy a Surface Pro 2 and a Surface Pro 6. I had to because the Surface was the series that finally gave us the pen computing Avery (yeah the people who make our yellow pads) promised at Comdex '93 in Vegas.
Ptetty much i have utter distain for computers these days. only use them because i can still earn a reasonable living designing SQL DBs, Foxpro dev (yup there is actually a fair call for the uber dBase language). But i do it in private and was my hands afterwards.