The volume of software that we have produced with new tools has increased dramatically. The quality has remained at a level that the market can accept (and it doesn't want to bother paying for more quality for the cost of it).

Absolutely. I missed the punch card days, but have been here for the rest, and software quality is way higher (overall) than it used to be.

Sure, people were writing terrible code 25 years ago

XML oriented programming and other stuff was "invented" back then