Do programming language advances make up for mental decline as one ages?

Arguably, programming languages and their ecosystems are getting more complex, and the pace of change has increased rather than decreased. So you need to learn more, and more often, than you had to in the past. While some things also get easier, and you can accomplish more than in the past, I don’t think the mental complexity is decreasing. Complexity has a way of always increasing until things break, so I don’t have much hope of the general trajectory improving.

My opinion after programming for 55 years: The field repeatedly expands beyond what your can mentally encompass. This is not because of cognitive decline. Trying to separate the effects of these two factors seems impossible. Two things are certain: you will have to repeatedly restrict your scope; and your productivity will continue to expand beyond what you thought would ever be possible. You do have to keep active in the field to avoid losing your edge though.

Programming gets "easier" because there's more to do. You need a scalable way to write software quicker because there are many more use cases that 20 years ago nobody though of.

You don't want spend anymore 6 month to write your UI interface for example, something that probably was ok to do 20 years ago.

It doesn't get easier, you just have more abstraction that helps to quickly build applications.

If it gets easier, it's easier for young folks too

Those advances actually makes it more difficult, since there are new paradigms to learn. AI might help though.