There's a pattern - it happened with smartphones too - where a new technology appears, and at the beginning people engage with it directly. They use it, they do things with it. And in that type of relationship there's the opportunity to have fun with it. But then as the new medium grows - as it becomes more economically lucrative and scales to an exponentially bigger audience - it's made to be more efficient instead. Eventually users no longer use, they consume.
Think about how weird and wonderful the first iPhone apps were, with their kitschy skeuomorphism and novel uses of sensors. The accelerometer-based lightsaber. The sound boards. The odd and interesting domain-specific utility apps. Even Instagram had personality back in 2010. And then people would jailbreak their iPhones, so they could add widgets and toolbars and ridiculous neon color themes. The smartphone started out as a magical anything-object that people looked at as its own entity, just as web pages started out as magical worldwide bulletin-boards that people would put together and decorate for their own sake.
These days the smartphone is boring. It intentionally falls to the background, serving as little more than a stylish content-pipe feeding your every craving. It is minimalist and inoffensive and ever-present. Even apps are supposedly on their way out. The very action of opening an app and doing something is seen as a piece of friction, keeping people from consuming content as effortlessly. Google Assistant and Siri would rather predict what you want and serve it to you before you even ask for it.
Play is how the human brain stays alive, and it can't happen without back-and-forth interaction and tactility, and user agency.