I mean this is a good attitude but it's hard to overstate how different things are now than back then.
My first real job in high school was as an assistant engineer/intern at a recording studio, and I was an avid musician, producer and band member then and for a decade or two following. This would have been about 1989, and at the time the reality was it was very hard for an average musician to be able to produce anything that would sound remotely like a professional recording at home.
Even things like the classic Tascam cassette based 4-track recorders were pretty expensive, and then you'd need microphones and serviceable compressors and reverb and so on to make something respectable. I mean, we did it, we bounced tracks, we used the pause button, we put drums in stairwells, all that. Sure it was fun, but it was challenging, and you could make a good argument that it was an obstacle to actually making music.
Even when digital came along it was still miserable for awhile. One of my earlier professional computer experiences is the literally hundreds of hours spent messing around with Windows NT settings trying to figure out how to keep a Pro Tools rig functional and at least sort of reliable, when the first PT systems came into our studio. And those even were way out of the financial reach of home musicians.
And we're not even talking about duplication and distribution issues. I grew up in D.C. and some of those early engineering gigs were for Dischord records, which at the time had taken the genuinely innovative approach of getting vinyl pressed in Eastern Europe, because of the strangehold on vinyl capacity in the US that made it really tough to do small runs of independent music. Most people didn't have that ability to buck the system. If what you were doing wasn't recognized as commercially viable by some kind of label you were probably going to do it in obscurity.
Yes, of course, artists can always thrive and find a way in the face of adversity. But that doesn't mean it's not adversity. It was so much harder back then, the digital changes since that era that first enabled project and portable studios, and eventually made it plausible to go from a laptop to the top of the charts in a matter of days.
The access to gear is a real, substantive difference, and I don't think it's fair to dismiss the changes out of hand. The changes have made it possible for a lot more people to participate.