More than ever, computing is influenced by computer power. When I started, memory and disks were small and expensive, and CPU speed was almost nothing. Coding required using resources carefully and in clever ways.
These days, being that careful and clever would be a waste of time. Although cleverness helps if you’re pushing a modern computer to its limits, e.g. the PS5 architecture and UE5’s triangle-per-pixel renderer. Even Photoshop won’t edit huge images without some top-level algorithms.
For the vast majority of problems, programmers don’t need to care much about efficiency — the CPUs run so fast that the performance difference between good and mediocre code is too small to measure. But other areas remain sensitive (e.g., scaling a website from a few thousand to several million users), so depending on what you want to do, you’ll need to be sharp.
Another big change is that there are way more libraries and frameworks available now, and other online resources like open source and help forums with example code snippets. Lots and lots of good books too. Reinvention can and should be avoided.