Which invokes the question: What has happened that people accept lower and lower quality? Is new software nowadays still really useful?

Users are mostly not programmers or anything related and will only notice bad quality, when it has piled up for a longish time, because they only observe the consequences of bad decisions and practices and don’t experience what bad code impacts first: the work on the code itself and the ability to add new functions or correct mistakes made.

i think nginx has an oauth_module which would allow you to use something like keycloak, if you want more than basic auth.

for apache mod_auth_openidc exists.

setting up an oauth-provider is not exactly trivial, but well documented and could be worth it if your other services offer oauth2-support or don’t feature a login at all.