Sure, and back in the day, if the power went out in the dentist's office, it didn't matter, because with no X-rays and no electric drills, the guy would just keep pounding away at your tooth with a hammer and chisel.
In the old days a lot of people had to do a lot of work to keep track of things which is now done automatically at the register. The "Cash Register" as it was (which registered the exchange of cash) doesn't even exist nowadays. What is in its place is a money/inventory control/employee monitoring system which greatly enhances the ability of the store to track who is working and what they are doing, what is being sold, how many are left, and how many need to be ordered, plus method of payment, tons of info about customers which enables retailers to stock what people want and helps them anticipate which new products to order .....
Ah, for the Goode Olde Days, when cancer was always fatal ... and so were half a hundred other diseases .... When doctors advertised cigarettes and denied there were any health issues associated with smoking.
Sorry, the Goode Olde Days had their drawbacks as well as their strengths. Same as today. Mostly because it is all humans doing stupid human tricks anyway ... and people don't change much from generation to generation. The foci change; the tech changes; but human beings do the same stupid stuff decade after decade, Millennium after millennium.
Yeah, a garbage bike from 50 years ago is a lot Different than a garbage bike today. That doesn't mean everything used to be better .... just that everything is always different.
Except people. We still pull the same stupid nostalgia bit when we start to age, telling everyone how much better everything used to be ... forgetting that our 'better" was the previous generation's "worse."
I'd be glad to find an '70s Schwinn at a yard sale or something .... I'd ride it. I have two mid-'80s bikes which I enjoy riding. Doesn't mean my modern bikes suck.
And yeah, consumerism has led us to the current situation where everything wears out fast ... and you know what? Even if the stuff Doesn't wear out, a lot of people replace stuff just because they find it enjoyable.
For a while a friend and I made spare cash by driving through upper-middle class neighborhoods the night before trash day, picking up the perfectly good stuff they were throwing away because they wanted something new.
No one Makes people be consumers. people have fun that it can be fun to consume. Most people don't Want the "same, old" appliance or clothing or tool ....they want the "latest, greatest ...."
What we don't like about it isn't that it is existentially "bad" but that it is not the situation, nor the values, which we had growing up. Hey, news flash---Every generation has different values and a different environment, social and commercial, than the previous generation.
(Generalization Warning
if our parents hated early rock, or for some, the last vestiges of rock, which their kids loved .... we hate rap and hip-hop, which the kids love. Around the turn of the 20th century, parents hated blues and jazz ... around WWII Swing was the evil unholy, devolved music that parents hated.
Same as it ever was.