I guess, it's still somewhat similar. For example, producing a posterized image previously involved separating and clamping brightness ranges using orthographic film and expertly judging exposure time, and masking these masks by other masks, or tracing images on masking film, before you could even think of preparing the actual printing process. Notably, both methods involved an interpretation of the image, aesthetic judgement, and expertise, guided by experience how this would behave robustly in a printing process. Now, there is a "posterize image" dialog, which does the same by a single click. – The modern approach is hard to control, though, which may be one of the reasons, we don't see that aesthetic not that much, anymore. It practically vanished from common experience. The impact of "easy to use" technology on our culture and shared imagination is not to be underrated, and may not work out the way, we may have expected.