My observation is that the accomplishments of older times would be entirely impossible today, like basically all the public services we enjoy wouldn’t be possible if they were proposed as a new thing.

Take the post office, if somebody had a big idea for the government to build tens of thousands of buildings and hire over a million people just to move around pieces of paper - they’d be laughed out of the room. Impossible, the government couldn’t and shouldn’t do any of that. All public services: the fire department, the police department, and especially public libraries, that all couldn’t be created in the current political environment if it hadn’t already been built.