Why does it always have to be about money? There are cheaper alternatives to most supplements on the market. You can buy plain and cheap Arginine, Glutamine, Creatine, and Whey Protein at a variety of places.
There really is no way to compare a new 16 years to the existing 16 years. But if you could, you could compare the new training log to your old training log that you kept. You could see how quickly you added weight or increased reps. How much faster or slower you reached your bench press goal, or whatever goals you were trying to achieve.
There really is no right or wrong answer here. Taking supplements doesn’t make you right or wrong, nor does not taking them make you right or wrong. It is simply a matter of your preferred method of training and how you want to achieve your goals. Some people clearly think they are unnecessary while others have seen the benefits.
More than once I have worked out so hard, I couldn’t perform my job the next day. Not a problem if I sat behind a desk or had worked at a convenience store, but I was loading 53’ tractor trailers by hand at the time. I ultimately had to scale back my workouts just so that I could perform my job. If the recovery supplements existed back then, I certainly would have taken them.