I love these stories. I got my start around 1998 when the web was coming into full force which was only a decade after this and very different. Things were changing quickly in that era.
The closest I've had to this was working at a company that had been around for close to thirty years and had kept many of the original developers (they'd taken the product from a terminal interface to the web, from cobol to c#) and had many stories like the one in the original post.
I started a few years after you, around about 2003. There were certainly pockets of industry that still operated exactly the same as the article described, especially defense and aerospace.
Which makes sense, given working in embedded hardware (especially in classified contexts) back then came with a lot of the same limitations described in the article - software had to be delivered by sneaker-net, installation was burdensome, you couldn't just fire up the application for a quick bug fix at home, etc. Not to mention the inertia of having Always Done It That Way.
I started about 10 years after, and I think that was almost the best of both worlds. Agile was starting to become a thing, but wasn’t perverted to sell expensive courses and credentials yet, and tooling began to be developed that was a serious improvement on what we had.
The closest I've had to this was working at a company that had been around for close to thirty years and had kept many of the original developers (they'd taken the product from a terminal interface to the web, from cobol to c#) and had many stories like the one in the original post.