When I was a kid, you could but germanium diodes and ferrite core coils, and make yourself a crystal radio - it was _magic!_
But...
There was no way I could have gotten hold of something like an Arduino - probably not for _any_ sort of money, never mind the sort of budget kids birthday or Xmas presents run to...
The same with a lot of other stuff, I had to wait till my first paper round job to be able to save up enough money to buy the ~$200 (in 1982 dollars) radio control gear before I could build an rc plane. These days that's $24 or so delivered from China...
I remember playing with my fatyer's grandfathers predecessor to Meccano, stone building blocks with pressed steel girders. I suspect children today probably look on historical toys like lego with similar charm/disdain...
The trajectory goes: mainframe: one computer, many people personal computer: one computer, one person ubiquitous computing: many computers to many people
If anything, people are going to be programming the shit out of everything in the future, not pulling back.
Someone, somewhere will have to program all these wonderful gadgets.
While it is conceivable that all development will occur only inside big mega-corps, I somehow doubt it. People have a voracious appetite for new content.
Smart money is on the tools to create new stuff becoming more widespread, not less.
Think of the hobbyists who send their phone into space on a balloon.
But that's long term, it doesn't mean that we don't want to avoid repeating the eras where this kind of tinkering was repressed or legislated against. Those eras slow down innovation and take wasted effort to recover from.
Just look at what happened on the web when all those tinkerers stopped having to break into the tools they wanted to use and could spend all their energy doing new things.