there might be a decent amount of "survivorship bias" too. meaning you only hear of the few events where someone starts from first principles and actually finds, be it luck or smarts, a novel solution which improves on the status quo, but i'd argue there are N other similar situations where you don't end up with a better solution.
That being said, I so disagree with just taking the "state of the art" as written in stone, and "we can't possibly do better than library x" etc.
Plenty of "state of the art", at least a decade ago, that was not very state of anything.
I think bias is inherent in our literature and solutions. But also, I agree that the probability of a better solution degrades over time (assuming that the implementations themselves do not degrade - building a faster hash table does not matter if you have made all operations exponentially more expensive for stupid, non-computational, reasons)
That being said, I so disagree with just taking the "state of the art" as written in stone, and "we can't possibly do better than library x" etc.