There used to be so many great tricks to fix drawings, like “cut ins”… where if you had that marker slip like Mike was talking about you would carefully “cut in” a clean section of paper and do that little section over.
I think the type of presentation drives a lot as well. In the early days when presentations were always made in person you see these beautiful large format toned paper drawings. In the 90s we were faxing a lot of early concept work, so a concept had to be shown in bold black and white. Sharpie and finalizer on white paper so it would go through that crapy thermo paper in the fax machine. Maybe because the sketch quality didn’t translate well we focused on breadth of ideas. Now most things are presented digitally, control Z and near unlimited zoom may have lead to some over detailing and perhaps over working a smaller set of ideas?
Like anything, they are just tools. There was plenty of bad design back then as well but using the lens of history we can edit down and just focus on the good stuff. 