I'm outing myself as being too old and cynical, but at a certain point, most of most of the projects I work on are effectively the same exact setup but with just enough differences from one another than reusing previous work is less efficient than just building things from scratch.

I'm old and cynical as well, but this has not been my experience at all. Perhaps the difference isn't in how long we've been doing it but what projects we choose to take on?

I don't know. I do know that every time I hear someone complain about how a lot of their work is just boiler-plate, I wonder how our respective experiences can be so different.