@Macarena I feel like the modern recipe is much easier. For one you can just put it in a slow cooker and go to sleep. For two she was making it sweet by caramelizing the natural sugars in the sweet potatoes and then concentrating the sweetness by slowly reducing the moisture, stirring constantly so as not to burn it. A short cut would be to simply add sugar and cook less time.
As an Italian trained chef I'll tell you a tomato sauce from scratch takes hours to make, the long slow cooking time mellows the acidity and brings out the sweetness. A short cut to reduce the cooking time dramatically is simply to add a tablespoon of sugar to the sauce.
Refined sugar used to be super expensive, world empires treated it as a commodity like crude oil. It's a cash crop.(it still is today to a lesser extend) Before the process for making beet sugar was invented sugarcane and slavery was the norm. Just like coffee and tea people are still exploited to this day to make profits on it. Today about half the refined sugar on grocery store shelf is beet sugar the other half cane sugar.
For centuries people went through elaborate cooking techniques to get a little sweetness, today people take it for granted.