And for the most part, we abandoned this style when we got
32-bit machines that had as much as a (gasp!) megabyte of memory...
Yes and no (know maybe) - as Pike said "cat -v" considered harmful.
The original small is beautiful idea that made UNIX so welcome, was lost in the process.
I remember when we got the money to maxed out the memory on an 11/34 form 48K to 256K bytes (using aftermarket memory of course). And as you point it, it is a lot easier when we use the computer to so a lot more of the work (that why we have compilers, debuggers and tools in general). But when I look at programs written by daugther and her peers, I realized that just have the innate feel for what is needed to get the job done often seems lost to them. Things just grow and use this framework or thank subsystem. It so easy to grab, that I wonder if we are ahead or behind.
That said, I do not yearn longly for V6. It was a fun system and we did a lot with it and I certainly learned a ton. But I am way more productive on my Mac. But I think the program style and lessons that many of us have from the those times is to try to get to the nut of the task at hand and remember how you are getting there.
Let me be less abstract. I recently found an Open Source NIXIE tube subsystem from a guy that used an Arduino. Its very cool and impressive. Think about it, use a $4 computer to run each NIXIE tube, instead of lots of logic to multiples the pins. But when I looked at his code, I shook my head. Basically straight lined everything, brute force. I remember being taught, if the routine is longer than a printer page or two, break it up. I took his code, put a bunch of the things into tables, made a few functions to use those tables and cut the size of the code even with the tables, by almost a 3rd and its a lot easier to understand.
In fact, I wrote a small subsystem so I could debug the whole thing using a UNIX pipe to represent each digit, as debugging on the Arduino is a really, really poor.
But what did I do - I applied lessons from a great system, UNIX to create a clean, easy to understand (and even debug).
Anyway - my thesis is that bigger is not always better.