While I'm only 40 y/o - I started with computers really early (Amstrad CPC 6128, later Amiga before PCs).
And both of you seem correct.
Looking at short enough time window, and especially if you don't know those lower/deeper levels (concepts) - even more so if you focus on buzzword/trends - it does seem to change a lot.
With deeper and longer term context, and focus on concepts - IT is seemingly doing circles. From mainframes and thin clients to fat clients to big servers, to "serverless".
Last time I checked "serverless" it went from it's initial "So it's basically like CGI scripts - each request executes a program from scratch" to "And now it's faster with persistence" (so like FastCGI/Plack/etc).
Of course with orders of magnitudes improvements in memory size, execution & computation speed and bandwith/latency...
Every now and then, some things which were impractical/gimmicky and maybe even not possible (e.g. text to speech, sound/image to text, 3D/VR/raytracing, ML/AI ...) finally become possible.
And on occasion the sum of those "new but theoretically/conceptually old" things unlock something that's really kind of new - like video deepfakes.
To me personally - ChatGPT and similar still seem like just much less (but still a bit) gimmicky variant of those end of 1990s IRC and early 2000s phpBB chat bots.