The massive complexity, diversity and general black-box nature of modern PCs leads me to believe that we won't have a similar scene of enthusiasts to develop amazing hacks for, say, 2009 Dell Inspiron laptops.

There's an elegant simplicity in these old pieces of hardware, it's relatively easy to study them exhaustively and if you're clever enough you might find a new way to fit the pieces of the puzzle to do something nobody had though possible before. If you want to hack a modern PC you'll probably first have to spend a few years reverse-engineering the various parts to figure out how they work exactly and what you can do with them. Even getting a basic understanding of the low level details of a modern GPU is quite a massive undertaking.

if anyone cared