It would be the internet, yes. Generally before, you'd live with bugs or if a patch is released on a CD somewhere or a relatively small one on the internet, that would be a separate .exe. Patches were done manually and by choice and not automatically. But the interest was also considerably slower, so big updates weren't viable. My childhood/early teenage years were spent with dial-up, so something like a 100mb would have been INSANE and once we got 256kbps broadband, it was like things were lightning fast (yes, I know older members will go "why in my day, we only had magazines had to write the code from the magazines!" or something like that.
100mb used to take hours and nowadays...it takes seconds.
But software is generally easy to patch these days. Which is also a shame in that bugs get patched in games too, as odd as it seems, there are bugs you could use as exploits, which could be fun or just the general charm of learning about a bug and breaking the game in some way. Heck, in FFXIV, an MMO, somebody discovered a way of going "out of bounds" in a house district and for a long time Square Enix didn't know about this, so we'd just have fun going to parts of the map we weren't supposed to and the fun of showing people how to do it. Sadly they discovered it and eliminated it.
However, I wouldn't necessarily BLAME the internet, but maybe the developers for urging and pushing software out before it's ready. For them it's cheaper that way and they get money quicker and also users will tend to report bugs and I guess makes it easier to find, maybe another way to look at it, as pay off for us, may mean we get releases sooner and they're able to invest those resources elsewhere in their budget. Ubisoft, EA and a couple of others get a bad rep for it, especially Ubisoft. And of course Skype and Spotify too. At one stage, both programs were unusable for me. I also used to get it with iTunes waaay back in the day, but I don't use it any more.
And I don't think it's just desktop applications. It can be web applications too, which probably have the most friendly update cycle, because they only have to update it on their server, but some stuff is just so poorly designed and poorly optimised and somebody learning web development I see a lot of things I am taught not to do and think, where in these allegedly professional environments these bad habits have been picked up. Though my main annoyance is the web application we use at work and working without our VPN, although made by and made for the same company, the two REALLY do not work harmoniously (when logged out of the VPN, things work - except the things we need a VPN for). The old version of the application used old Active X controls and only worked in IE in Compatability mode and would break itself once in a while. Then they updated with a new one, which was supposed to be our saviour, whilst there were improvements, for example, cross-browser compatibility, meaning I run Google Chrome at work. But our VPN can still break it and recently, it's been a lot worse. The VPN is triggering Google Chrome's built in security features, which I am hesitant to override to avoid inadvertently breaking IT policy and I frequently get kicked out on Firefox. It's most stable browser is Internet Explorer, which to me feels odd, but I get no errors on it...however, it is also considerably slower. XD
But it's also us minions using it, not some end user, so I guess there's less of an incentive to make it work completely smoothly, as long as we can still do our job effectively enough.