In my mind I included software of your own free choosing. As in, not only what’s in the app-store of your device, but that software the kid down the street hacked together for you.

But yeah, I see your point. Of course my memory is somewhat clouded by the circle of people I choose to surround me with.

(Edit: But even the 90s has started the downward slope. There was a time before that, and in first half when systems booted into a BASIC-interpreter)

An interesting case to exemplify: Minecraft started out as java application. You downloaded a set of jar-files an ran. The software was proprietary, but it was yours to run, and java being what it is, was fairly simple to modify and extend. A large community of tinkeres and hackers grew up around this capability of modding the software in various ways.

Then commoditization happens, Microsoft bought it, rewrite it in c++ and started selling it as a service with an app-store. Modding is still part of the echosystem, but the barrier to entry is sufficiently high that I have hard time imagine any new generations of hackers growing up as Minecraft modders.