"Everything "new" is just a rehash of something old with a fancy new name."

I'm sorry, but IMO this is simply untrue.

I've been doing this longer than most -- 40 years of programming in dozens of languages, in a wide variety of fields and platforms. I have a pretty good sense of old vs new.

With that context, I'm pretty confident saying that serious cutting-edge programming is little like what it was 20 years ago. Software engineering best practice has changed dramatically, and programming best practice even moreso. The FP coding techniques I use constantly today were considered weird academic experiments in the mid-90s, but have matured to the point where they result in far better, more expressive, more maintainable code. Programmers who actually grok modern techniques are much more effective than those stuck in the past.

A greybeard who is keeping up to date can provide a lot of perspective on these new techniques -- no question about that. But anyone who thinks that nothing is new is either not paying attention, or not understanding what's been happening...