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It used to be engineering, clever design and comfort rather than tech. I don't know if it still is. For example, buy a Jaguar XE and you get an extraordinarily well engineered rear suspension system which arguably they really shouldn't have wasted the money on developing. Buy a small Peugeot and you get trailing arms and a torsion bar. Merc E classes have 2nd sun visors under the main ones for when you want to put them over the side windows. Having said that, you get cost-cutting on them too. Order leather and you get plastic. You need 'Nappa leather' for the real thing.
My friends have a Skoda Fabia estate and the suspension is harsh, it clonks, it creaks. It just feels cheap and it's not comfortable. Come from a Passat (never mind an Aston!), for example, and you can tell where the cost cutting happened. However it you've never experienced that level of car you'd never know. You'd just look at the kit and go 'yep, it's got satnav, power steering, electric windows and aircon, we're good to go.'
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bq
I was thinking today, what's on higher-end cars now that's not yet widely available at lower tiers?
Our 2007 BMW and 2019 Seat basically have the same set of toys, with automatic lights/wipers, heated seats, steering headlights, cruise control, voice control, settings saved to keys etc etc. The BMW has slightly more motorised things (doors, boot, seats) but less connectivity and shitter displays. 12 years seems like a long time for not that much to change - 12 years before 2007, electric windows seemed luxurious.
I've not noticed anything wildly interesting on car-building tools but maybe the changes have all been on the autonomous safety side with lane keeping, auto-brake, adaptive CC, etc, with Tesla self-driving the bleeding edge?