I got interested in computers because I wanted something to play games on, that's all I cared about... and my cousin wisely told my parents to get me an Amiga 500 instead of what I wanted. It came with a lot of manuals which I devoured, and though I didn't program much on the Amiga, I owe a lot to all that (most importantly a point of comparison -- it's not like I haven't experienced all the stuff that came later, and I know I missed out on an even more "empowered" time in the 80s, I barely just catched the tail end of a golden age).
https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals
Glorious.
Sure, most kids who had an Amiga didn't get that deeply into it, e.g. a friend of mine who also had an Amiga never seems to use his computer for much more than playing games and watching movies to this day. But for anyone interested to dive deeper, the doors were wide open and and as encouraging and honest to newbies as humanly possible. Even my non-technical kid friends knew how to load up a neat module in protracker. None of that focus on quality and openness for the sake of quality and doing the right thing was to the detriment of the "casuals", and a polar opposite of a world of stuff like miniminzed JS that does nothing interesting, smartphone apps that half-ass what a website could do, games that just rehash and dumb down the same shit to keep people consuming.
The shift from tools and variety to mere consuming and fads is rather crass, come to think about it.