Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft that are almost nothing but modding tools pretending to be games, and getting all sorts of interesting fans doing interesting things.
Where most AAA game engines used to make modding easy but licensing to sell mods hard, there are now entire engines (Unity, Unreal) with fairly simple, linear (as opposed to exponential or worse) license systems that allow hobbyists to build with the same tools of AAA developers and license their work for resale, growing organically with their audience size rather than being constrained to artificial limits of steep license curves.
It's one of those cases where it's both better than its ever been and worse than it ever was, and you can write clickbait articles for both sides of that, but overall, unclouded by nostalgia glasses the answer is probably just that it's the same as it ever was.