Well, the funny thing is that most antibiotics are regularly found in the wild, this one was discovered by screening for inhibitors of soil microbes that were produced by other soil microbes. These things have probably been in the wild for centuries, but it's only when they get deployed on a truly massive (human-population-wide) scale that resistance actually reared its head up.

I remember a talk in a public health class I took in college showing the rise, fall, and subsequent rise of chemical resistance in the parasitic worms (or maybe the carrier flies) that cause river blindness in Africa. It all correlated pretty well to efforts by NGOs to drug-away the illness (as well as when they gave up when it became ineffective). Resistance might be quick to pop up, but it's sometimes just as quick to go back into hiding. Bugs who expend fitness on antibiotic pumps / mutant cell wall proteins usually get outcompeted by those who don't. Even the most fractional changes in fitness make a different when your division time is 20 minutes and the time scale is a few years.

This is a testament to anyone today who thinks we haven't moved forward, or have slowed down in comparison to these "golden ages" of discovery.

Funny enough, Derek Lowe has criticized genomics people in the past for declaring revolutions in medicine and then wasting billions of pharma dollars when the research failed to actually improve drug discovery. He's a pretty big stickler for "the only thing that can prove a good drug is good trials". Still soil microbe metagenomics is some pretty crazy research that only scratches the tip of the iceberg of all the possible biological information available on the surface of the earth.