I grew up in that era as well - but I realised it doesn't matter. I used to have compile my own kernels and fumble around with downloading and installing the nVidia drivers, and now my distro deals with that for me. I can go look if I want to, but I don't need to.

And you know what, it's better that way. The tech scene and civilisation moves forward because those abstractions lets us achieve more with the same amount of time.

I fully embrace that notion that one of the problems of the well polished machines is that access to the underlying layers is actively blocked. I think this is a very real problem.

However, if you want to learn programming, electronics, operating systems or any other level of the stack there is a plethora of options available to you. Most people simply have other interests.