It did in the sense that kids these days don’t worry about selling out. It’s a generational change.
Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc.
The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to.
So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different.
I'm not so sure. Even if you "hustled" with a small business, or sold stuff yourself for the money, you were considered a sell-out. Musicians weren't supposed to peddle t-shirts, for example.
The way I remember, it was more about resisting the establishment than being against commercialization. The ideal was keeping organizations small enough that everyone would be doing "real" work. Dedicated managers and administrators were inherently suspicious. Any organization large enough to employ middle managers (managers and administrators working primarily with other managers and administrators) was part of the establishment. If you worked with them, you were selling yourself out.
Of course, that's always existed. By 'commercial' I meant mass market. It's always been possible to break through, in IT Apple and Microsoft both started out with two techies hacking stuff together. Richard Branson started out trying to grow Christmas trees. Those are all a very few extreme outliers compared to the tens of thousands that would only ever have a chance of making it big by reaching the mass market.
Back then, people still believed in a better future, and the struggle for money was not as central as it is today. There was this belief that if everyone contributed something valuable and focused on things that were inherently important, there would be enough for everyone in the future.
People today are more militant and more focused on money, because they have lost hope.
I mean, I can understand that establishing a "brand" is more important nowadays, but it must still be important to carefully curate it and not mindlessly promoting anything that earns you money. When Tony Hawk promoted crypto.com, I immediately regretted any kind of respect I ever had for that man. Does the younger generation really not care at all?
It was a weird remembrance of the punk movement, and maybe counterculture before it, where basically any capitalist interaction was working with The Man and considered selling out.
Very few people still create something for the sake of creating something great. If you are aware of some of them please share !
The 90ies started with R.E.M. freshly signed on Warner instead of I.R.S. and ended with an absurd DAG of labels and sublabels and sub-sub-sub-labels (again, with the whole range from true grassroots independence to being part of one of the global media giants ten indirections deep), shortly before that entire monstrosity was put down by the onslaught of Napster, iTMS and so on.
The younger generation follows and idolizes social media stars and "influencers" that sell out 24/7, in the cheapest, corniest (late night tv informercial style) ways possible...
i.e., people who are based entirely on the "selling out" part without having created something to sell out in the first place.
They don't care. They do "hollistic deals", and sell Billie Eilish merchandize and Taylor Swift dog collars and barf bags. Music is just a byproduct of the whole thing...
Being able to monetize a personal brand is viewed as more than just benign, it's viewed as a societal endorsement of the individual and their ideas/perspectives/strategies.
Hustling is almost universally seen positively be anyone under 35.